  Modern electronic systems become evermore complex, yet remain modular, with
integrated circuits (ICs) acting as versatile hardware components at their
heart. Electronic design automation (EDA) for ICs has focused traditionally on
power, performance, and area. However, given the rise of hardware-centric
security threats, we believe that EDA must also adopt related notions like
secure by design and secure composition of hardware. Despite various promising
studies, we argue that some aspects still require more efforts, for example:
effective means for compilation of assumptions and constraints for security
schemes, all the way from the system level down to the "bare metal"; modeling,
evaluation, and consideration of security-relevant metrics; or automated and
holistic synthesis of various countermeasures, without inducing negative
cross-effects. In this paper, we first introduce hardware security for the EDA
community. Next we review prior (academic) art for EDA-driven security
evaluation and implementation of countermeasures. We then discuss strategies
and challenges for advancing research and development toward secure composition
of circuits and systems.
