Seminar announcement for 5/1(Wed) 3:30-5:00PM in ED 117   (Topic:   Hardware Security: Challenges and Research Opportunities)

Topic: Hardware Security: Challenges and Research Opportunities

Speaker: Shih-Lien Lu

              IEEE Fellow

              TSMC director

Time: 5/1 (Wed) 3:30-5:00PM

Place: ED 117 (工四館117)

Abstract:

A system is as secure as its weakest link. Current electronic systems employ a multiple-layers approach to ensure security and trust. At the bottom of the this multiple-layered methodology is a hardware based root of trust (RoT). It is important to ensure that this hardware root of trust is secure. Without this assurance other layers build upon this root of trust could not be trustworthy. In this talk, we first examine the definition of hardware security and why it is so difficult to guarantee hardware to be secure. Under this more restricted classification we outline some possible attacks on hardware with recent examples including hardware Trojans and side channels. We then discuss a couple research topics to ensure hardware security. In particular, we review the basics of physical unclonable functions (PUFs) which is a method recently proposed to generate the root key for hardware root of trust. We reason that the design of PUF is not the most critical aspect of research but the testing method. We close with the point that hardware security is a hard but important problem which has many research opportunities.

Bio:

Shih-Lien (Linus) Lu is currently a director at TSMC. From 1999 to 2016 he was with Intel Corporation. While at Intel he was a research scientist, a research group manager and later the Director of Memory Architecture Lab, Intel Labs. He served on the faculty of the ECE Department at the Oregon State University as an Assistant Professor from 1991 to 1995 and as a tenured Associate Professor until 2001 (on leave the last two years). From 1984 to 1991 he worked on the MOSIS project at USC/ISI which provides research and education community VLSI fabrication services. His research interests include computer architecture, memory system and circuits, VLSI design and hardware security. An IEEE Fellow, Shih-Lien received his BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and MS and PhD both in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA.