Scientific Foundations

Our world has become increasingly reliant on integrated circuits (ICs). Mobile phones are deeply enmeshed in our everyday lives, we drive cars equipped with hundreds of ICs, and have come to depend on the power grid and other cyber physical systems that are controlled by ICs. Not surprisingly, the issue of securing hardware has become increasingly vital. A reverse engineering adversary may, for example, be motivated by extracting intellectual property from a circuit, cloning a design for product piracy, or creating a targeted backdoor for stealing cryptographic keys.

The computer security community has long advocated the concept of building multiple layers of defense to protect a system. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to realize this vision in the practice of software development, and software often ships with inadequate defenses, typically developed in an ad hoc fashion.

Emerging intelligent automobiles will be able to harness advance on-car sensors to support new applications such as pollution detection, road condition monitoring, and traffic control. All these applications require the ability to verify both the location and the time of a reading. This project involves the design of verification methods that make use of environment factors, such as the presence of light and shadows and the measured wireless signal strength, instead of conventional public key infrastructure-based methods, in order to verify when and where data was collected.

A software implementation shows side-channel leakage when the physical effects of its implementation have a dependency to secret data such as cryptographic keys. Relevant physical effects include instruction execution time, memory access time, power consumption and electromagnetic radiation. Fifteen years after differential power analysis was first demonstrated, side-channel attacks are affecting software implementations in a broad variety of processors. Yet, without the support of automatic tools, programmers still have to resort to manual and error-prone insertion of countermeasures.

Reverse engineering of integrated circuits (ICs) has become a major concern for semiconductor design companies since services to depackage, delayer and image an IC can be used to extract the underlying design. IP theft of this nature has not only economic impact due to IP theft, but also compromises the security of ICs used in military and critical infrastructure.