Hardware vulnerabilities represent an increasingly critical yet overlooked threat to cybersecurity in today's globally distributed electronic supply chains. In this session, Dr. Basel Halak, director of the Cyber Security Academy, University of Southampton, will share the alarming scale of hardware-level attacks that can compromise critical infrastructure with devastating consequences - from counterfeit components in military systems to hardware Trojans providing backdoor access to servers.

Drawing on 15 years of research into hardware security, Dr. Halak will demonstrate why these threats are intensifying with the shift toward chiplet-based systems that multiply supply chain complexity.

The session will cover:

• Real-world cases of hardware tampering and counterfeiting that have compromised critical systems;
• How physical unclonable functions combined with blockchain can create tamper-resistant hardware identities;
• AI-based monitoring systems that can detect anomalous behavior in compromised hardware.