CAREER: An Integrative and Scalable Approach to Embedded Hardware Protection

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This project explores an integrative approach to embedded hardware security, where efficient design solutions complement appropriate test/validation steps and security analysis. It creates technology to protect embedded systems at different stages of life-cycle against hardware intellectual property (IP) piracy and reverse engineering, hardware Trojan attacks in untrusted design and fabrication facilities, and malicious modifications of hardware IP. It investigates a design approach based on scalable key-based hardware obfuscation to protect hardware IP from illegal usage and malicious modifications. The design technique is combined with a "self-referencing" based validation approach, which compares side-channel signature of a chip with itself - in both spatial and temporal manner, to reliably detect hardware Trojans. Security analysis is performed to measure effectiveness of the proposed framework using appropriate trust metrics and to identify emerging security threats. The approaches are validated using software automation tools and a custom hardware emulation platform. The research improves understanding of technological issues related to embedded hardware security and will enable technologies for secure and trustworthy hardware at low cost. The project integrates education through training students various aspects of hardware security using hands-on experiments, involving undergraduate and high-school students in research, and disseminating research results, course modules, software tools and the hardware test bed to local schools and peer research community. It will create awareness about the security issues and countermeasures through the "Hardware Security" group in Facebook created by the PI and through organizing special sessions in major IEEE/ACM conferences.