Introduction to a Special Session on Hardware Security for Smart Society

In the smart society, individualized and comprehensive services, which collect a wide variety of physical/biological data and utilize the knowledge acquired from them, are expected in applications with the real world, such as automobiles, industrial and household robots, and tailor-made medicines. On the other hand, security has become an inseparable issue in utilizing and expanding such next generation services. In particular, data protection by cryptography is essential for services that handle data containing sensitive and/or private information. However, when encrypted data is queried or processed, it usually needs to be decrypted once. It is difficult to completely prevent data stealing and/or tampering by attackers or malicious parties.