Research Interests: Applied Machine Learning in Hardware Security; Side-Channel Analysis; Hardware Security Primitives; Hardware Trojans Detection and Prevention; Harardware Obfuscation; System Security and Risk Models.
- Applied Machine Learning in Hardware Security: Over the past years, machine learning algorithms have been utilized by system defenders and attackers to secure and attack hardware. On the defense side, they are used against hardware Trojans and integrated circuits (IC) counterfeiting issues; and on the attack side, both machine learning ad deep learning methods are effective for side-channel analysis, modeling attacks on physically unclonable functions (PUFs), reverse engineering, etc.
|
- Side-Channel Analysis/Attacks: Attacks in hardware that are exploiting an unwanted channel to leak confidential information are called side channels. If the leaking channel of data is built using physical parameters of the system, which is dependent on the control flow, it is called a side channel. There are several side channels reported in hardware, and among the most exploited ones, we can name power, timing, EM, and temperature. SCAs are used to extract secret keys.
|
|
|
- Hardware Security Primitives: They are intrinsic hardware devices that intrinsically carry features and make them serve as building blocks for security solutions. play an important role in ensuring the trust, integrity, and authenticity of integrated circuits (ICs) and electronic systems. Examples are PUFs and TRNGs. PUFs extract secrets from a complex physical system. Because of random process variation, no two Integrated Circuits even with the same layout are identical. A TRNG is a device that outputs a sequence of independent bits The noise source is given by dedicated hardware: noisy diodes, thermal noise, radioactive decay, quantum photon effects, etc.
|
- Hardware Trojan Detection and Prevention: Hardware Trojan is a malicious modification or alteration of the original IC designed by an attacker in order to access and manipulate information stored or disable processing on the chip. Hardware Trojans may leak information and reduce the reliability of electronic systems in critical applications; therefore they are a real threat and should be considered as a serious concern to modern ICs. Various types of hardware Trojans, as well as detection and prevention techniques, are proposed by researchers. Machine learning-based HT detection techniques are relatively new and promising approaches.
 
|
- Hardware Obfuscation: Hardware obfuscation is a technique to conceal design from malicious attacks along the supply chain. An obfuscated design is functionally similar to the original design but harder to reverse engineer (RE). Hardware obfuscation protects IP design from piracy, overproduction, and RE. Logic locking is a type of hardware obfuscation technique where additional key gates are inserted into the circuit. Only the correct key can unlock the functionality of that circuit; otherwise, the system produces the wrong output and makes the circuit nonfunctional.
|
- Supply Chain Security: The overall landscape of the supply chain (design, production, deployment, operation, maintenance, and destruction or disposal stage) is vulnerable to various attacks. Other aspects of supply chain security are the security of netlists, protection of the manufacturing process to help prevent alterations or introductions of malicious elements (e.g. Hardware Trojans), and preventing overproduction or other forms of Intellectual Property (IP) theft or misuse. Therefore, semiconductor suppliers have understood the need to fortify subsystems, and have doubled down on the hardware security of new systems.
|
|
|