Our group presented two papers related to hardware security at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD). ICCAD is a top-tier conference in electronic design automation. There is an increasing emphasis on hardware security at ICCAD (and most other hardware design research venues) in the past years.

Prof. Jeremy Blackstone presented our group’s first paper: iSTELLAR: intermittent Signature aTtenuation Embedded CRYPTO with Low-Level metAl Routing. iSTELLAR presents a defense against electromagnetic and power attacks on that combines circuit-level and physical-level mitigations from STELLAR with notion of computational blinking. The end result is a flexible defense that enables a tradeoff between power consumption with leakage mitigation. The work was done in collaboration with Prof. Shreyas Sen (Purdue), Dr. Debayan Das (Purdue/Intel), and Dr. Alric Althoff (Tortuga Logic).

Our group’s second paper — Aker: A Design and Verification Framework for Safe and Secure SoC Access Control — was presented by Andy Meza. Aker is a design and security verification framework for system on chip access control. Aker provides flexible hardware access control wrappers that monitor memory accesses. And it provides an extensible security verification environment that can generate a variety of hardware security based upon the threat model. This work was done in collaboration with Dr. Francesco Restuccia (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna Pisa and soon to be UCSD!). The hardware designs and security properties are released for open use in our Aker repository.

Congrats to all the authors!

Related Links: iSTELLAR paper, Aker paper, Aker Repository