Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Ubiquitous and Unique Embedded Security

工程研究中心规划奖助金竞赛是作为ERC计划的试点征集活动进行的。计划拨款并不是整个ERC竞赛的一部分，而是为了在团队之间建立能力，以计划集中的、中心规模的工程研究。该奖项资助规划工作，通过开发新的硬件和软件生态系统，创建具有固有安全性和可控隐私的信息技术的无处不在的使用，其中组件在物理上是独一无二的，安全属性基于这种深深嵌入的、物理上不可改变的身份。组件的可信性将通过各种嵌入式系统和潜在威胁进行评估。将考虑开发开放硬件和软件以实现广泛分析和具有竞争力的生态系统的最佳方式。该奖项将用于组织和举办与潜在参与者和利益攸关方举行的几次规划会议。为这一努力还计划了一个教育和推广计划，范围从应届毕业生和本科课程到为高中生开设的暑期工程学院。该团队将在规划会议中包括学生，以提供关于教育机会的新见解。规划团队将解决的研究问题将从低级集成电路设计(例如，开发和使用物理上不可克隆的功能和基于网格的加密技术)到系统级的硬件和软件问题(例如，使用物理芯片特性来实现程序执行和数据的安全属性)，再到设备间通信(例如安全的网络连接)。开放架构的经济性、反向工程的威胁和法律问题增加了必须考虑的人和社会层面。推动这项工作的应用程序旨在解决社会规模的挑战：电子投票系统的安全处理和信任链，医疗保健系统中私人数据的可控传播，国防、基础设施和交通应用程序的嵌入式系统中可验证的执行。将制定研究生、本科和高中层面的新课程工作计划，以及针对高中生的暑期学院计划。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research. This award funds planning efforts to create the ubiquitous use of information technology with inherent security and controllable privacy, through development of a novel hardware and software ecosystem, where components are physically unique and security properties are based on this deeply embedded, physically unchangeable identity. The trustworthiness of components will be evaluated across a wide variety of embedded systems and potential threats. The best ways to develop open hardware and software to allow broad analysis and a competitive ecosystem will be considered. This award will be used to organize and run several planning meetings with potential participants and stakeholders. An education and outreach program is also planned for this effort, ranging from new graduate and undergraduate courses to summer engineering institutes for high school students. The team will include students in the planning meeting to offer novel insights on educational opportunities.The research problems that will be tackled by the planning team will span from low-level integrated circuit design (e.g., development and use of physically unclonable functions and lattice-based cryptography) to system-level hardware and software problems (e.g., using physical chip characteristics to achieve security properties for program execution and data) to inter-device communication (e.g. secure network connections). The economics of open architectures, threats of reverse engineering and legal issues add human and societal dimensions that must be considered. The driving applications for this work aim to address society-scale challenges: secure processing and chain of trust for electronic voting systems, controllable dissemination of private data in healthcare systems, verifiable execution in embedded systems for defense, infrastructure and transportation applications. A plan for new course work at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels will be developed, as well as a plan for a summer institute targeting high school students.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.