Hardware

Cryptographic systems often rely on the secrecy of cryptographic credentials; however, these are vulnerable to eavesdropping and can resist neither a user's intentional disclosure nor coercion attacks where the user is forced to reveal the credentials. Conventional biometric keys (e.g., fingerprint, iris, etc.), unfortunately, can still be surreptitiously duplicated or adversely revealed. In this research, the PIs argue that the most secure cryptographic credentials are ones of which the users aren't even aware.

To address today's environment of constant security challenges and cyber-threats, the Hardware-Assisted Lightweight Capability Optimization (HALCYON) research explores novel techniques to make the performance of more secure system designs acceptable to users. Conventional system designs have achieved acceptable performance, but have evolved from hardware and software designs that carry forward compromises in security that made sense in the past, but not with modern hardware resources in today's security climate.

Third-party hardware Intellectual Property (IP), written as code in a Hardware Description Language (HDL), is extensively used in modern integrated circuits. Contemporary electronics typically include 75% of third party hardware IP and only 25% in-house design to provide customization or a profit-making edge. Such extensive use of third-party hardware IP in both commercial and military applications raises security and trustworthiness concerns, especially in today's globalized market.

Outsourcing computation to the cloud has a difficult set of privacy challenges, a primary one being that the client cannot really trust cloud or application software. Encrypted computation achieves privacy by having the user specify encrypted inputs to a program in the cloud and returning encrypted results.

Silicon physically unclonable function (PUF) is a supplemental circuit embedded in an IC which generates signatures unique to its native IC. This signature could be used for authentication, protection of data and secure communication. PUFs rely on the presence of uncontrollable variations in the fabrication process causing the circuit parameters to exhibit randomness. Current approaches for PUF design have mostly investigated circuit and architectural aspects. PUF quality is severely marred by a lack of understanding of exactly how fabrication process variations impact the PUF responses.