Most intrusion detection lives in software, far from the physical signals it protects. Moving intelligence closer to the hardware—memory access patterns, bus behavior, power signatures—opens a class of detection that software-level attackers cannot easily see or suppress.
The hardware layer sees what software hides
A compromised operating system can lie to every agent running on it. It cannot easily lie about its memory access patterns, timing behavior or power draw. Signals collected below the software stack provide ground truth that survives compromise above it.
Small models, close to the metal
Detection at this layer must run within tight compute and latency budgets, which favors compact anomaly models trained on device-specific baselines over general-purpose classifiers. The constraint is a feature: models this small can run continuously without competing with the product’s workload.
Detection is only half the architecture
A hardware-layer alert needs a response path the attacker cannot intercept: isolated reporting channels, autonomous protective actions and forensically useful capture. Designing that path is as much a hardware problem as a security one.