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The hardware security community has grown significantly over the past decade. However, research on the most advanced topics such as reverse engineering, physical attacks, and counterfeit detection remains stuck in the early stages of investigation and/or development. First, owning and maintaining the required instrumentation is too prohibitive for academia, thereby limiting research to a few focused labs in industry and government. Second, the knowledge and expertise needed to fully understand these topics and to address their challenges lies at the intersection of multiple non-overlapping scientific fields including microscopy, physics, material science, and computer engineering. Third, electronic hardware spans multiple levels (device, chip, printed circuit board, and system), which are each subject to unique attack modes and requirements. Although some book chapters and surveys have attempted to bridge these gaps, they only introduce the basic concepts to academic researchers, students, and practitioners.
The goal of this project is to create a course that exposes students to advanced topics in hardware security. Specifically, ten educational modules will be created that cover (1) the background and motivation for destructive and non-destructive reverse engineering, invasive and non-invasive probing, fault injection, and counterfeit detection; (2) the fundamentals of inspection/attack equipment including optical microscope, scanning electron microscope (SEM), focused ion beam (FIB), photon emission microscope (PEM), and X-ray microscope (XRM); and (3) an introduction to the image processing, machine learning, and classification techniques needed to make sense of microscopy data in the context of hardware security. The components of each module will include one or more lectures, an interactive equipment demonstration, an archetypal data set, and multiple forms of assessment (quiz, lab experiment, and exam). Data sets and demos will be generated based on prior research experiments as well as new experiments using the world class instruments available at University of Florida. By making the educational materials available to the academic community, this project will have a significant impact on education and workforce development in cybersecurity, failure analysis, and electronics testing.
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SaTC-EDU: PHIKS - PHysical Inspection and attacKs on electronicS