Information Hiding based Trusted Computing System Design

Abstract : This proposal is a three-year research project to enhance trust in computing system design, which we have achieved by a combination of research (21 published work), education (4 graduated Ph.D. students and 2 undergradauted courses), and presentation (18 invited talks). We focus on the design and implementation of sequential circuits, a crucial component for any real-time computing systems. More specifically, we demonstrate that (1) severe vulnerabilities exist in systems designed with today's design methodology; (2) an adversary can embed hardware Trojan without compromising design quality or being detected; and (3) practical design techniques can be developed to establish trust in sequential design. We have also investigated how to enhance system's trust by leveraging both the underlying hardware of the system (silicon physical unclonable functions) and the environment where the system operates (electrical network frequency signals), and how to improve the trust in a wireless sensor network with the presence of insider attackers. This project has contributed to raising the global awareness of hardware security and trust. The PI is currently working with AFRL researchers through a summer faculty program to expand trust design to nanoscale devices.