Economic and Consumer Chain Analysis of Secure Hardware Adoption

Hardware security advances in memory protection and software compartmentalisation serve to improve security implementation of digital systems. Realising such improvements depends on several factors, and will have to acknowledge cost-benefit perspectives, and state of developer and user practice.

This project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of the the Digital Security by Design Social Science Hub+ (Discribe), setting out to address the economics of secure hardware adoption, and what secure and insecure practices across the consumer chain influence such adoption. While our evidence building would be cross-sector, we will draw out case studies from a select few verticals including (a) automotive, transport and logistics, (b) digital manufacturing, and (c) consumer electronics.

The project has TU Delft (Netherlands) and Aston University (UK) as partners, with support from TechWorks, SEMI Europe and Logistics Research Network (LRN).