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ECE Seminar: Dr. Matthew Hicks

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Location
B02 Coordinated Science Laboratory Auditorium
Date
Nov 14, 2022   10:00 - 11:00 am  
Speaker
Associate Professor Matthew Hicks, Computer Science, Virginia Tech
Contact
Angie Ellis
E-Mail
amellis@illinois.edu
Phone
217-300-1910
Views
25
Originating Calendar
Illinois ECE Calendar

Fabless not trustless: identifying, quantifying, and filling trust gaps during outsourced IC fabrication

Abstract:  Since the dawn of the Integrated Circuit (IC), the size of the transistors used to construct them continually shrinks, following the trend set forth by Moore’s Law. While this advancement significantly improves computing capability, fabrication costs have skyrocketed, following the trend set forth by Rock’s Law. As a result, most IC design houses outsource fabrication. Outsourcing fabrication presents a security threat: given the size of modern ICs, comprehensive post-fabrication inspection is infeasible. Thus, outsourcing fabrication opens the door to undetectable malicious modification of IC designs during fabrication (i.e., insertion of a hardware Trojan). Defending against an untrusted foundry is challenging yet important: with as few as two transistors, hardware Trojans compromise otherwise-perfect software. Exacerbating the problem is the permanence of hardware faults: given the lack of a general-purpose patching technique for hardware, fixing hardware flaws often requires replacement; an infeasible task for many deployments.

In this talk I will cover my three-step approach to addressing the untrusted foundry problem. In the first step, I uncover the extreme design point in the hardware Trojan landscape: a hardware Trojan that leverages analog-domain properties to achieve previously unseen levels of stealth, while maintaining the controllability seen with much larger, digital-domain hardware Trojans. In the second step, I use the developed analog-domain hardware Trojan (along with their digital-domain cousins) as reference attacks to design and evaluate a system for quantifying the per-Trojan risk of outsourcing IC fabrication to an untrusted foundry. The result is that commercial IC designs leave thousands of possible hardware Trojan implementation possibilities open to attackers. In the third step, I prevent the silent insertion of even the stealthiest (i.e., analog domain) hardware Trojans into IC designs by targeting routing-layer congestion around security-critical wires---preventing the attacker from connecting their Trojan to itself or the original design. I will conclude the talk with a look at future hardware Trojan designs that require as little as zero transistors and those that make reproducibility unlikely across both machines and power cycles.

Biography:  Matthew Hicks is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. His research focus is securing computer hardware from attacks during its design and fabrication, including side channels. Dr. Hicks has a special interest in the analog-domain aspects of circuits that operate in the digital domain, including how they fail and how they retain data. His 2016 A2 foundry-level attack paper won the 2016 IEEE Symposium of Security and Privacy (Oakland) Best Paper award. In 2018, he was recognized as a DARPA Riser, followed by a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2019, and the DARPA Director’s Fellowship in 2021. In 2020, his defense against foundry-level hardware attacks was given the R&D 100 award. Then in 2021, he was awarded the NSF CAREER Award for his work in hardware security and recognized as Virginia Tech College of Engineering’s Outstanding New Assistant Professor.

Prior to Virginia Tech, Dr. Hicks was a member of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he led several hardware security projects. He was a lecturer and postdoc at the University of Michigan focusing on the intersection of computer architecture and computer security. He holds a PhD and MS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BS from the University of Central Florida.

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