Hardware in Cybersecurity: From the Weakest Link to Great Promises
It is well-known that hardware implementation can outperform the software implementation of most applications, including security primitives such as encryption, by up to several order of magnitudes. However, hardware implementation may also make these mathematically sound security primitives vulnerable. In this talk, we will discuss the role of hardware in cybersecurity. First, we will use the finite state machine (FSM) model to demonstrate that systems built with today's design flow and tools are vulnerable against a simple random walk attack. We further show that a malicious designer can embed Hardware Trojan Horse (HTH) into the system to gain unauthorized control of the system. We then describe a practical circuit level technique to guarantee the trustworthiness of the circuit implementation of a given FSM. Second, we describe our recent work on physical unclonable function (PUF), a unique feature embedded in the chip during fabrication process. PUF has many promising applications in security and trust such as device authentication and secret key generation and storage. We will focus on the usability problems of PUF: how to push the amount of PUF information we can extract to the theoretical upper bound; how to ensure that the PUF information is random (and thus secure against attacks); how to improve the hardware efficiency when implementing a PUF. Finally, we will show very briefly a couple of our projects on hardware-software co-design in building security and trust to demonstrate the great promise that hardware can bring to cybersecurity.
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- Fairleigh Dickinson University
- Teaneck, New Jersey
- United States 07666
- Building: Auditorium M105, Muscarelle Center
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Hong Zhao (201)-692-2350, zhao@fdu.edu; Howard Leach h.leach@ieee.org
- Co-sponsored by School of Computer Sciences and Engineering, FDU
- Starts 09 March 2015 07:00 PM UTC
- Ends 03 April 2015 05:00 PM UTC
- No Admission Charge
Agenda
Gang Qu received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000. He is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland at College Park. He is also a member of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center and the Maryland Energy Research Center. Dr. Qu is the director of Maryland Embedded Systems and Hardware Security (MeshSec) Lab and the Wireless Sensors Laboratory. His primary research interests are in the area of embedded systems and VLSI CAD with focus on low power system design and hardware related security and trust. He studies optimization and combinatorial problems and applies his theoretical discovery to applications in VLSI CAD, wireless sensor network, bioinformatics, and cybersecurity. He has published more than 150 journal articles and conference papers in these areas. Dr. Qu is an enthusiastic teacher; he has taught and co-taught various security courses including VLSI Design Intellectual Property Protection, Cybersecurity for Smart Grid, Reverse Engineering and Hardware Security Lab, and a popular MOOC on Hardware Security through Coursera.