Prof. Naghmeh Karimi of Rutgers University

The circuitry comprising an IC degrades over its lifetime, ultimately resulting in IC failure. While IC designers put a tremendous effort on reducing aging effects and enhancing the reliability of electronic chips, adversaries may aim at accelerating the wearout of these chips. In practice, a malicious adversary may accelerate the aging process of an IC and thus shorten the devices life span. This talk explores the security vulnerability of modern microprocessors against aging attacks and presents a hardware attack (called MAGIC) that maliciously accelerates NBTI aging effects in processor cores. By analyzing the structural information of a processor, a sequence of assembly instructions that accelerate the aging process is developed and a program consisting of these instructions is crafted. By executing this application, the core is maliciously aged and the chip fails sooner than expected.

Biography:

Dr. Naghmeh Karimi is currently a visiting Assistant Professor at the ECE Department of Rutgers University. She received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Tehran in 2010. Between 2007 and 2009, she was a visiting researcher at Yale University. She was a Postdoctoral researcher at Duke University in 2011 and a visiting Assistant Professor at New York University between 2012 and 2014. Dr. Karimi's research interests include Design-for-Testability, Design-for-Reliability, Design-for-Security, Computer Architecture and VLSI. She has published over 25 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings and authored three book chapters.

Email:

Address:Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Rutgers University, 94 Brett Road, #122, Piscataway , New Jersey, United States, 08854