What are the responsibilities and job description for the Security Firmware Engineer position at Micron Technology?
Join Micron's diverse team, where you’ll play a pivotal role in advancing our elite memory and storage solutions. This is an outstanding opportunity to be at the forefront of innovation, crafting the future of secure firmware development!
Responsibilities
- Integrate existing ASIC team APIs/workflows to help automate SCA/FI testing workflow.
- Collaborate with hardware-based root-of-trust to test/verify security attestation of underlying system.
FPGA Emulation & Hardware Integration
- Use FPGA prototyping platforms (Xilinx, Intel, etc.) to emulate ASICs and support pre-silicon firmware and test development.
- Partner with hardware designers to boost our team’s proficiency in validating and testing custom IP.
ASIC Bring-Up & Post-Silicon Debugging
- Bring up new silicon using low-level diagnostic firmware, with a focus on verifying security, reliability, and hardware-software integration.
- Debug early silicon using JTAG, logic analyzers, and custom test harnesses.
Scripting & Automation
- Write Python and shell scripts to automate test flows, validate register access, and perform continuous regression testing.
- Assist the product security team by enabling quick and repeatable testing workflows, suitable for rapid SCA/FI test iteration.
- Collaborate with security architects to ensure test coverage of hardware threat models.
- Use fault injection and other techniques to verify resistance to tampering and unauthorized access.
Security & Vulnerability Research
- Conduct firmware- and hardware-level vulnerability research on in-house and third-party IP blocks.
- Investigate potential attack vectors that lead to privilege critical issues, side channel leakage, etc.
- Stay ahead of emerging hardware threats such as speculative execution attacks, firmware rootkits, and side-channel techniques.
- Develop firmware-level mitigations for potential side-channel attacks, as well as fault injection.
Required Qualifications
- Master’s or equivalent experience in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field.
- Previous experience in embedded or low-level firmware development, including silicon bring-up and platform initialization.
- Deep understanding of memory-mapped I/O, interrupt handling, boot sequences, and peripheral bring-up.
- Hands-on experience with FPGA tools (Vivado, Quartus) and hardware debuggers (JTAG, SWD, protocol analyzers).
- Experience developing for and interacting with secure IP blocks (e.g., crypto engines, OTP, secure fuses, trusted execution zones).
Preferred Qualifications
- Sophisticated level experience with firmware-level security testing, including writing test vectors for secure state transitions and cryptographic operations.
- Familiarity with hardware vulnerability research, including techniques like side-channel analysis, fault injection, and firmware fuzzing.
- Knowledge of threat modeling, attack surface analysis, and mitigation strategies in silicon and firmware.
- Experience analyzing or defending against firmware exploitation techniques (e.g., bootloader bypass, debug unlocks, backdoors).
- Ability to read and interpret RTL (Verilog/SystemVerilog) for purposes of firmware interaction and test coverage.
- Contributions to security research, publications, CVEs, or open-source firmware/hardware security tools.
- Previous experience using Python 3.10 to automate testing and test development.
To learn more about Micron, please visit micron.com/careers
