Public Research Seminar by Microelectronics Thrust, Function Hub - Security Validation for Designing Trustworthy System-on-Chip Architectures

We are living in a connected world where a wide variety of computing and sensing components interact with each other. These Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as wearable devices (e.g, fitness trackers, smart watches, and medical devices), autonomous vehicles and smart homes, impact every aspect of our daily life. Based on the estimates from International Data Corporation (IDC), by 2025 the number of connected devices will be 55.7 billion, and the data generated by these devices will be 73.1 ZB. Therefore, it is critical to ensure the security, reliability, safety and privacy of these devices. System-on-Chip (SoC) is the brain behind these computing devices today. Unlike micro-controller based designs in the past, even resource constrained IoT devices nowadays incorporate one or more complex SoCs. The attackers can explore a wide variety of vulnerabilities on these devices to mount attacks in different levels, such as hardware level, firmware level, and software level. Security issues in the hardware level are typically difficult to fix, but usually have significant impact. In this talk, I will highlight several fundamental challenges in analyzing SoC security vulnerabilities and introduce practical solutions to mitigate them. These approaches include (1) hardware security validation by combining logic testing and side-channel analysis, (2) SoC trust validation by interleaving simulation and formal methods, and (3) functional validation by scalable traversal algorithms.