Hardware Security: Identifying Vulnerabilities in Unspecified Functionality

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Cybersecurity Lab Seminar Series
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Speaker:        Dr. Nicole Fern
                UC Santa Barbara

Title:          "Hardware Security: Identifying Vulnerabilities in
                 Unspecified Functionality"

Date:           Monday, 19 September 2016

Time:           10:30am - 11:30am

Venue:          Room 3501 (via lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Traditional verification methods and metrics attempt to answer the
question: does my design correctly perform the intended functionality?
This talk will look at hardware verification from a security perspective,
which demands the verification effort answer an additional question: does
my design perform malicious functionality in addition to the intended
functionality?  This talk will motivate through examples why malicious
design modifications, known as Hardware Trojans, altering only unspecified
design functionality are both powerful and stealthy and provide an
overview of the techniques our group has developed to address this threat.


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Biography:

Nicole Fern received her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering
from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and her PhD
degree in the ECE department at UC Santa Barbara under the advisement of
Professor Tim Cheng.  She is now a post-doc at UC Santa Barbara and a
Visiting Scholar at HKUST.  Her research interests include hardware
verification and security with an emphasis on identifying and verifying
unspecified design functionality susceptible to malicious manipulation.