The Fraunhofer Institute AISEC has authored a study on behalf of the BSI, which gives an overview of the state-of-the-art on hardware attacks against microcontrollers and describes some countermeasures, which are easy to implement and can prevent many attacks or increase the effort for an attacker significantly. Concepts such as the progressively spreading internet of things (IoT) further increase the pervasiveness of microcontrollers in areas within industrial and consumer products.

Furthermore, they can be found in sensitive applications such as access control systems or electronic wallets. In these applications, the controllers often contain credentials like cryptographic keys. Therefore, they are an attractive target for adversaries.

Due to their pervasiveness and accessibility, microcontrollers are not only exposed to classic attacks like buffer overflows. These are mainly carried out remotely via software. Here also special attacks come into play that are not targeting weak spots in the software, but use properties of the hardware itself. These attacks include Side Channel and Fault Injection Attacks.

Experience has shown that hardware security is often not considered enough in product development. Often countermeasures could be implemented at an early development stage.