Protect

Hardware security, whether for attack or defense, differs from software, network, and data security in that attackers may find ways to physically tamper with devices without leaving a trace, and mislead the user to believe that the hardware is authentic and trustworthy. Furthermore, the advent of new attack modes, illegal recycling, and hard-to-detect Trojans make hardware protection an increasingly challenging task. Design of secure hardware integrated circuits requires novel approaches for authentication that are ideally based on multiple layers of protection.

Information security remains a persistent and growing problem in the United States due to ever-progressing reliance on information technologies and systems to provide critical services and enable society's contemporary way of life. The economics of computing favor performance and functionality over security and may continue to do so for some time. This environment is created by graduates of education programs, programs which can be argued to be lacking in emphasis on security impacts associated with this new information age.

The security and integrity of elections is paramount in the furtherance of democracy. However, enhanced security often comes at the cost of making voting systems significantly more difficult for voters to use. With input from stakeholders in the voting process (most notably Travis County, Texas), we are constructing a prototype voting system and investigating how to design such a system so that it is significantly more secure than current solutions, without making it harder to participate in the election process.

The availability of ideal randomness is a common assumption used not only in cryptography, but in many other areas of computer science, and engineering in general. Unfortunately, in many situations this assumption is highly unrealistic, and cryptographic systems have to be built based on imperfect sources of randomness. Motivated by these considerations, this project will investigate the validity of this assumption and consider several important scenarios where secure cryptographic systems must be built based on various kinds of imperfect randomness.

This proposal provides funding for the second GREPSEC: Underrepresented Groups in Security Research workshop, which will be affiliated with the annual IEEE Symposium on Research in Security & Privacy, in May 2015, in San Jose CA. The first event, held in May 2013, attracted 50 participants, two-thirds of them students, and almost all from underrepresented groups.