Doctoral Thesis:  Integrated Hardware Security for Practical and Low Overhead Protections

By: Maitreyi Ashok

Thesis Supervisor:  Professor Anantha Chandrakasan

Thesis Committee: Professor Dirk Englund, Professor Mengjia Yan

Details

• Date: Monday, December 9
• Time: 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
• Category: Thesis Defense
• Location: 36-428 (Zoom link provided upon request)

Additional Location Details:

Abstract:
Privacy, integrity, and availability are required tenets of security in all hardware systems. Especially in the current decade with high levels of government and corporate funding in the integrated circuit (IC) market as well as rising geopolitical tensions, it is paramount that all deployed systems fully consider security as part of the design process. While methods of achieving security, mostly focusing on digital cryptography, have been developed over the last 20 years, these do not easily extend to all the types of circuits that are required for complete hardware systems. Furthermore, these protections generally come at a high price for cost and resource constrained systems.

Thus, we present security mechanisms for various applications that are well integrated with the main system so that they add low overheads, but still provide enough protection against practical levels of threats. Through these works, the need for adding security as an important initial design constraint, which leads to implementations with well-integrated solutions is shown. As a result, they are able to achieve lower overheads than a naive post hoc security patch, leading to greater adoptability of secure integrated circuits in commercial systems.

Host

• Maitreyi Ashok
• Email: Maitreyi@mit.edu