Towards Universal Metrics for Hardware Cybersecurity Assessment
Ahmed Y. Abdalmagid, Samar M. Hussein Shukry, Hassan Soubra · 2023
The number of computers has soared around the globe, notably with the omnipresence of the Internet of Things (IoT). Cybersecurity threats have naturally become a major concern. When mentioning cybersecurity, software and networking aspects often come first to mind. Nevertheless, hardware attacks are being carried out and should not be neglected. Metrics are a powerful indicator tool for better management of systems, software and devices. They allow objective assessment of the cybersecurity of a computer system. The scientific literature review showed scarcity in discussing hardware metrics from a cybersecurity aspect. This paper presents metrics to evaluate the security of a device against hardware attacks without the need of testing the attack on the device (i.e. pen-test the device). This is done by assessing the characteristics and the mitigation the device has. A tool to automate some of the cybersecurity metrics proposed has also been implemented as a proof of concept and is also presented in this paper.