The objective of Trust-Hub project is to lead a community-wide movement toward stronger assurances in the digital hardware industry. The Trust-Hub is a means for information sharing between researchers and practitioners to accelerate the development of defenses against hardware-level attacks. This project proposes the development of Trust-Hub, a central web-based repository for technical papers, benchmarks, hardware platforms, source codes, tools, and other information that accelerates hardware security research and developments.
Intellectual Merits: This project plans to develop benchmark circuits infected with hardware Trojans (called trust benchmarks), create hardware platforms to validate trust benchmarks, and develop a web portal to accelerate research and development in hardware security and trust. The project includes (i) creation of a large set of static trust benchmarks, (ii) benchmark complexity analysis, (iii) procedures to dynamically generate trust benchmarks with hard-to-detect Trojan instances, (iv) platforms for hardware emulation and validation of Trojan detection methods, (vii) a web-based repository called Trust-Hub, and (viii) comprehensive validation test suites.
Broader Impacts: The results of this project would be of interest to fab-less semiconductor companies, US government agencies and university researchers worldwide. Benefits to the society include trustworthy electronics for healthcare, defense, weather forecasting, finance, transportation, and automotive applications. By integrating the results of this project into existing courses and by offering new courses in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, the PIs will impart cutting-edge engineering knowledge to students and improve their hardware design, security verification and test skills.
Embedded Security Challenge is a red-team blue-team white-hat hardware hacking competition. ESC helped sharpen the participating students (undergraduate, graduate, and PhD) security mindset (thinking like a hacker while building a system). ESC also helped build capacity in hardware security; Companies, Universities and the DoD benefited by the capacity built in this area of hardware security. Several of the participants joined the DoD and the companies as engineers and Universities as faculty. The results of the various ESC yielded numerous (over 500) benchmarks for the hardware security research community. These benchmarks are widely used. ESC provides a crowd sourcing platform for security assessment of defenses developed by any one. Three hardware security techniques developed by researchers from NYU, U Connecticut and Columbia were thorougly evaluated by the participants of the ESC. This provided vaulable information for the designers of these hardware security defenses. This CRI participants have organized over a dozen tutorials in all aspects of hardware security at leadinf conferences (including at International Test Conference, VLSI Test Symposium, International Conference on Computer Design, Design Automation Conference, Latin American Test Workshop, European Test Symposoium). The CRI participants organized several special sessions based on ESC at leading conferences (including IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, and IEEE VLSI Test Symposium). They have organized several special issues of IEEE Transactions (including IEEE Transactions on Emerging Technologies on Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics, Proceedings of IEEE and IEEE Transactions on CAD). Overall, ESC and the TRUSTHUB continue to be a go to place for benchmarks, news, announcements, tutorials etc regarding all aspects of the emerging area of hardware security.
