CAREER: Investigating the Impact of Device Aging on the Security of Cryptographic Chips

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Cryptographic chips implement cryptographic functions in hardware for better performance. Despite the significant performance benefits, cryptographic chips can be compromised by the adversaries via monitoring their power-consumption, tampering their logic or placing the chips under stress to generate erroneous outputs to infer sensitive data. The current protections against such attacks do not consider aging of the devices that can cause parametric shift of device parameters over time. Device aging may potentially compromise device security. This project will investigate the the effects of device aging on the security of cryptographic devices.The goal of this project is to understand the aging-related risks that compromise security of cryptographic devices, particularly those with protection against physical attacks and develop solutions to ensure security when device aging comes into account. This project will focus on the following threats and investigate how aging can affect them: (i) The state-of-the-art side-channel analysis attacks; (ii) The state-of-the-art fault-injection attacks; and (iii) Hardware Trojans whose activation can be facilitated/hardened due to aging. It will target the shortcomings of these schemes and develop aging-resilient countermeasures to circumvent side-channel and fault-injection attacks. This project will also investigate aging-aware Trojan detection solutions.The success of this project will enable the development of long-lasting security for trusted hardware platforms, and result in aging-resistant security solutions that benefit the society via devices that remain secure over their lifetime. To attract graduate, undergraduate, and underrepresented students to hardware security and cryptography research and education, this project will develop a new course on cryptography, hardware security, and testing. Tutorials will be conducted and internships on hardware security will be offered to undergraduate students. This project will also seek to attract underrepresented minorities. Lectures on hardware security will be organized for Cristo Rey Jesuit high-school students. The project repository will be stored electronically and made available through the website hosted by the University of Maryland Baltimore County, department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (https://www.csee.umbc.edu/~nkarimi/). The data will be retained for a period of at least five years following the end of the grant period.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.