COLLOQUIUM
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina

Design of Secure and Anti-Counterfeit Integrated Circuits

Yingjie Lao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Minnesota

Date: January 23, 2015
Time: 0930-1100
Place: Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge)

Abstract

As electronic devices become increasingly interconnected and pervasive
in people's lives, security, trustworthy computing, and privacy
protection have notably emerged as important challenges for the next
decade. The assumption that hardware is trustworthy and that security
effort should only be focused on networks and software is no longer
valid given globalization of integrated circuits (ICs) and systems
design and fabrication. The design of secure hardware ICs requires
novel approaches for authentication that are based on multiple factors
that is difficult to compromise. Equally important is the need for
protecting intellectual property and design of integrated circuits
that are harder to reverse engineer. In this talk, I will explore both
of the authentication-based and obfuscation-based hardware protection
approaches. One popular technique of authentication-based protection
is Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) which provide a hardware
specific unique signature or identification. I will provide an
overview of the reconfigurable PUF structures and circuits that could
achieve higher security. Next, I will present a novel low-overhead
solution to design Digital Signal Processing (DSP) circuits that are
obfuscated both structurally and functionally by utilizing high-level
transformation techniques. Finally, I will describe the theme of my
future research: security, randomness, and computing.  

Yingjie Lao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.