Scientific Foundations

The Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) based security primitives typically suffer from area/power overhead, sensitivity to environmental fluctuations and limited randomness and entropy offered by Silicon substrate. Spintronic circuits can complement the existing CMOS based security and trust infrastructures. This project explores ways to uncover the security specific properties of the magnetic nanowire and capture them in detailed circuit model.

The Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) based security primitives typically suffer from area/power overhead, sensitivity to environmental fluctuations and limited randomness and entropy offered by Silicon substrate. Spintronic circuits can complement the existing CMOS based security and trust infrastructures. This project explores ways to uncover the security specific properties of the magnetic nanowire and capture them in detailed circuit model.

Today's Internet has some 1.7 billion users, fosters an estimated $1.5 trillion in annual global economic benefits, and is widely agreed to offer a staggering array of societal benefits. The network sees enormous demand---on the order of 40 Tbps of inter-domain traffic and an annual growth rate of 44.5%. Remarkably, in spite of the Internet's importance and rapid growth, the core protocols that support its basic functions (i.e., addressing, naming, routing) have seen little fundamental change over time.

Two methods used for vulnerability discovery in network protocols are testing and a semi-automated technique called model checking. Testing and model checking implementations of network protocols is a tedious and time-consuming task, where significant manual effort goes into designing test cases and protocol property specifications. Both approaches require detailed and structured information about the tested protocols, in the form of messages, state machine, invariants, etc. Most of the time this information is derived manually by people with different levels of expertise.

Advances in privacy-enhancing technologies, including cryptographic mechanisms, standardized security protocols, and infrastructure, significantly improved privacy and had a significant impact on society by protecting users. At the same time, the success of such infrastructure has attracted abuse from illegal activities, including sophisticated botnets and ransomware, and has become a marketplace for drugs and contraband; botnets rose to be a major tool for cybercrime and their developers proved to be highly resourceful.