Hardware Security & Trust

Modifications to integrated circuits (ICs) or the insertion of foreign intellectual property (i.e. hardware Trojans) pose a serious threat on US sovereignty as ICs are found in many commercial electronic devices including phones, computers, and televisions as well as US assets that rely on ICs for computation or control such as our energy infrastructure, banking, or more importantly defense systems. The primary goal of our research group on hardware security and trust is to secure US electronic assets by assuring that the integrated circuits that are installed do not include functions (or modifications to expected functions) that compromise the IC and more importantly the systems that rely on these ICs. We aim to address hardware security by both prevention of attacks (including IP piracy and information theft) through circuit level techniques, and active detection of malicious circuitry. Our group is developing circuit techniques and methodologies that can be incorporated by the semiconductor industry to improve the security of ICs through enhanced detection of hardware modifications, countermeasures that disable adversarial circuit components, and simulation infrastructure to analyze the efficacy and cost of security measures such as RTL/circuit obfuscation.