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While hardware resources for computation and data storage are now abundant, economic factors prevent specialized hardware security mechanisms from being integrated into commodity parts. System owners are caught between the need to exploit cheap, fast, commodity microprocessors and the need to ensure that critical security properties hold. This research will explore a novel way to augment commodity hardware after fabrication to enhance secure operation. The basic approach is to add a separate silicon layer, housing select security features, onto an existing integrated circuit.

As one of the most promising emerging concepts in Information Technology, outsourced computation (also known as cloud computing) is transforming our perception of how IT is consumed and managed, yielding improved cost efficiencies and delivering flexible, on-demand scalability. Cloud computing reduces IT resources and services to commodities acquired and paid-for on-demand through a fast-growing set of infrastructure, platform, and service providers.

This project promotes the progress of science and technology development by providing the empirical knowledge needed to advance fair, just computational research. Big, pervasive data about people enables fundamentally new computational research, but also raises new ethical challenges, such as accounting for distributed harms at scale, protecting against the risks of unpredictable future uses of data, and ensuring fairness in automated decision-making. National debates have erupted over online experiments, leaked datasets, and the definition of "public" data.

This project addresses how semiconductor designers can verify the correctness of ICs that they source from possibly untrusted fabricators. Existing solutions to this problem are either based on legal and contractual obligations, or use post-fabrication IC testing, both of which are unsatisfactory or unsound. As a sound alternative, this project designs and fabricates verifiable hardware: ICs that provide proofs of their correctness for every input-output computation they perform in the field.

Malicious actors such as hackers, terrorists or nation-states can disrupt, intercept or manipulate the Internet traffic of entire countries or regions by targeting structural weaknesses of the Internet. Strategic physical locations exist in the Internet topology. Despite much recent interest and a large body of research on cyber-attack vectors and mechanisms, we lack rigorous tools to reason about how the Internet topology of a country or region exposes its critical communication infrastructure to compromise through targeted attacks.