STARSS

Digital information has become an integral part of our daily lives and there is a growing concern about the security of information. The amount of information that should be kept secure is increasing with the proliferation of high-tech electronics such as smart-phones, tablets, and wearable devices. Accordingly, the number of attacks from malicious parties to obtain the secret information that is stored in a secure (i.e., encrypted) device increases.

The trend of outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing to oversea foundries has introduced several security vulnerabilities -- reverse engineering, malicious circuit insertion, counterfeiting, and intellectual property piracy -- making the semiconductor industry lose billions of dollars. Split manufacturing of integrated circuits reduces vulnerabilities introduced by an untrusted foundry by manufacturing only some of the layers at an untrusted high-end foundry and the remaining layers at a trusted low-end foundry.

Embedded systems play a large role in our daily lives. They are found in everything from computers and consumer electronics to appliances and automobiles, and represent a market estimated to be worth almost $160 billion. Many of them, however, use inexpensive microcontrollers that cannot easily be analyzed, so it is unclear how well they operate in practice. This work seeks improve the safety and security of these systems by developing techniques to analyze their firmware, particularly with regards to the popular Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Bluetooth protocols.

Vulnerability of electronic systems and particularly computing systems to malicious attacks through the insertion of software viruses or hardware Trojans is of growing concern to society. This work is focused on understanding, detecting, and mitigating a potentially devastating type of hardware Trojans that an adversary or hardware hacker can insert in the analog component of many of the integrated circuits that will be fabricated in the future.

This project will develop new open-source processor architectures with advanced security features. The security features will be added to existing open-source processors to help protect the confidentiality and integrity of data and to protect against side-channel attacks. Beyond the design, the project will also provide new methodology to verify the proposed security feature, to provide assurance that the processor hardware itself is provably secure.