Keysight Device Security Workshop 2026: Day 1 Skills Lab
All embedded systems can leak, glitch, and fail, which means hardware security can no longer be optional.
Embedded systems are everywhere. They control the devices we use, the infrastructure we rely on, and increasingly the safety‑critical systems we trust. And while the hardware security landscape is rapidly evolving, so are the threats. Attackers no longer need to break your software; they can extract secrets directly from silicon, manipulate execution at the hardware level, and bypass protections your code never anticipated.
But where do you even begin? How do you know if your device is at risk, and how do you start building the expertise to do something about it?
The Keysight Device Security Workshop 2026 is designed to provide both technical understanding and strategic clarity. The workshop is structured as a two‑day experience, combining a hands‑on Skills Lab Day with a Workshop Day focused on cutting‑edge knowledge, industry direction, and long‑term strategy.
Who We Are and Why Hardware Security
For more than twenty years, the Keysight Device Security team has focused on understanding how embedded systems fail under real‑world physical attacks, and how organizations can build products that withstand them. Our work spans research, tooling, lab methodology, and hands‑on evaluations across industries ranging from consumer IoT to high‑assurance systems.
We develop the hardware, software, and workflows used by security labs, certification bodies, and semiconductor manufacturers worldwide and the Skills Lab gives you direct access to the same tools and expertise
Is This Workshop for You?
Before we get into what you'll learn, take a moment and ask yourself these questions:
- Does your hardware store, process, or transmit sensitive information?
- Are your embedded systems connected to (or part of) a larger network of devices?
- Does your organization take product security seriously, or is it coming under increasing pressure to do so?
- Do you design or develop your hardware in-house?
- Does your product need to achieve security certification before it reaches the market?
If you found yourself nodding at even one of those questions, the Keysight Device Security Workshop 2026 and especially Day 1: the Skills Lab, is your ideal starting point.
Whether you are building your first evaluation lab from scratch or optimizing an established testing environment, KDSW equips you with the skills, tools, and strategic perspective needed to make confident device security decisions.
Day 1: The Skills Lab
Learn by Doing: Hands-On, No Experience Required
The Skills Lab is designed as a guided learning experience, not a full multi‑day training course. It is a full‑day technical introduction focused on explanation, live demonstrations, discussion, and shared understanding, complemented by targeted hands‑on sessions that allow you to apply what you’ve just learned. The goal is to provide a solid, practical understanding of two of the most important hardware attack techniques used today: Side‑Channel Analysis and Fault Injection.
Throughout the day, Keysight experts walk you through concepts, setups, and real attack flows step by step, encouraging questions and interaction. Hands‑on practice is intentionally concentrated toward the end of each technical block, giving you time to experiment yourself while keeping the broader focus on understanding why attacks work, not just how to execute them.
No prior background is required. The Skills Lab starts from first principles and focuses on building real intuition (not just theory) about how these attacks work, why they matter, and how professional security teams approach them in practice. By the end of the day, participants will have walked through complete attack flows and practiced key steps themselves, guided by Keysight engineers.
You will work directly with the Inspector Software Suite, learning how attackers observe a device, how they manipulate it, and how those same techniques can be used to validate and harden your own products.
This is your opportunity to understand why hardware fails under certain conditions — and what it takes to begin securing it.
Agenda: From First Principles to Real Attacks
Rather than walking through a disconnected list of topics, the Skills Lab is structured as a progression, taking you from zero knowledge to executing your first complete security experiments.
- Side Channel Analysis (SCA)
The day begins with an introduction to Keysight Device Security and the broader hardware threat landscape, setting the context for why side‑channel attacks matter and what makes them such a powerful attack vector.
- Setting the context: An introduction to Keysight Device Security and the broader hardware threat landscape, explaining why side‑channel attacks matter and why they are so effective against modern embedded devices.
- Understanding leakage: Learn how physical behavior, such as power consumption and electromagnetic emissions, unintentionally reveals information about secret operations inside a device, and how attackers exploit this leakage in practice.
- The hardware behind SCA: Get hands‑on with the Keysight PXI‑based device security testbench. Learn how professional measurement hardware is configured, calibrated, and connected to a target under test
- Attack demonstration: Watch a complete side‑channel attack unfolds live, from signal acquisition through statistical analysis to cryptographic key recovery.
- Real‑world context: Explore how side‑channel attacks have been applied against real products, and what those results mean for your own device designs and security assumptions.
- Hands‑on practice: Find the Key: Using the Inspector Software Suite, run a full side‑channel analysis campaign. Work with ready‑captured traces, apply leakage analysis techniques, and identify cryptographic operations inside a target device.
- Fault Injection (FI)
A complementary attack technique that goes beyond observation to actively disturb a device's operation.
- Beyond observation: Learn how fault injection actively disrupts a device’s operation, moving from observing behavior to forcing it to fail in controlled, exploitable ways.
- How faults work: Understand how precisely timed perturbations in voltage, clock, or electromagnetic fields can cause instruction skips, corrupted computations, or bypassed security checks.
- Fault Injection setup: Explore the hardware used to deliver precise, repeatable faults and learn what a real‑world fault injection setup looks like in a professional security lab.
- Real‑world exploitation examples: See a fault injection attack executed end‑to‑end, including timing calibration, parameter selection, and successful exploitation of a target device.
- Hands‑on practice: Optimize Parameters: Use the Inspector Software Suite to configure a fault injection campaign, tune parameters, and achieve a successful glitch against a real target.
What Do You Need to Bring?
Just your laptop. We provide the entire testing environment so you can focus fully on learning, not setup.
Any modern laptop that can open a browser and connect to the internet will work. During the Skills Lab, you will log into a secure Azure‑hosted virtual machine running Windows and the full Inspector Software Suite. All computations, signal processing, and attack workflows run on the VM, not on your local machine.
Behind the Skills Lab: Inspector Software Suite
Throughout the Skills Lab, participants use the Inspector Software Suite, Keysight’s end‑to‑end device security testing platform built on more than 20 years of hardware security expertise.
Side‑Channel Analysis and Fault Injection are not isolated techniques; they are two sides of the same hardware security coin. Side‑channel analysis reveals what a device is doing by observing its physical behavior. Fault injection exposes weaknesses by deliberately disrupting that behavior. Together, they provide a comprehensive view of a device’s true security posture.
Inspector encapsulates decades of research and evaluation experience, delivering more than 100 modules that accelerate every phase of a security campaign — from signal acquisition to advanced analysis and reporting.
At a glance, Inspector provides:
- Complete side‑channel workflows, from acquisition and signal processing to leakage detection and statistical key recovery
- Full fault injection workflows, from communication control and perturbation execution to differential fault analysis
- A highly open architecture, with approximately 95% of modules available as open source for transparency and customization
- Java and Python APIs that enable automation, integration, and scalable campaign execution
- Additional features such as reporting tools, cipher construction, and module customization further support scalable and repeatable security evaluations.
- Extra capabilities designed to support the evaluation of quantum‑resistant implementations, including TVLA data generation and known‑key analysis for algorithms such as Dilithium, as well as support for building customized analysis workflows tailored to post‑quantum use cases.
During the Skills Lab, participants have full access to Inspector. This is not a demo environment, it is the real platform, running real attacks on real hardware.
Day 2: Workshop | Cutting-Edge Knowledge & Strategy
Designed for engineers, researchers, lab managers, and decision‑makers, the Workshop Day covers regulatory and certification trends, post‑quantum cryptography, emerging research and attack surfaces, and updates on the Keysight Inspector and hardware roadmap.
Participants with existing SCA and FI experience may choose to attend Day 2 only.
Four Global Locations. Zero Cost.
KDSW 2026 takes place in four strategic locations worldwide. Attendance is completely free for both days.
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Day 1 — Skills Lab: Wednesday, 22 April 2026
- Day 2 — Workshop: Thursday, 23 April 2026
- Santa Clara, US
- Day 1 — Skills Lab: Tuesday, 5 May 2026
- Day 2 — Workshop: Wednesday, 6 May 2026
- Arlington, US
- Day 1 — Skills Lab: Tuesday, 19 May 2026
- Day 2 — Workshop: Wednesday, 20 May 2026
- Asia-Pacific
- Day 1 — Skills Lab: Coming soon
- Day 2 — Workshop: Coming soon
Ready to Join Us?
Hardware security is no longer optional. It is a core competency for anyone building or evaluating embedded systems in a world where physical attacks are increasingly accessible, regulations are tightening, and the cost of getting it wrong continues to rise.
Join us in 2026 and take your first step into hardware security, with the tools, expertise, and guidance to build a secure ecosystem.
Registration is free. Seats are limited. Bring your laptop, we bring everything else.
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