Towards Hardware Cybersecurity

Professor Houman Homayoun
Associate Professor Dept. of ECE, UC Davis, Davis, CA

Cerent Engineering Science Complex, Salazar Hall 2009A
3:00 PM

Abstract - Electronic system security, trust and reliability has become an increasingly critical area of concern for modern society. Secure hardware systems, platforms, as well as supply chains are critical to industry and government sectors such as national defense, healthcare, transportation, and financial. Traditionally, authenticity and integrity of data has been protected with various security protocol at the software level with the underlying hardware assumed to be secure, and reliable. This assumption however is no longer true with an increasing number of attacks reported on the hardware.

In this talk I will address the security and vulnerability challenges in the horizontal integrated hardware development process. I will then present the concept of logic obfuscation through using hybrid spin-transfer torque CMOS look up tables which is our latest effort on developing a cost-effective solution to prevent physical reverse engineering attacks.

Dr. Houman Homayoun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at UC-Davis. He is also the director of National Science Foundation Center for Hardware and Embedded Systems Security and Trust (CHEST). Houman conducts research in hardware security and trust, data-intensive computing and heterogeneous computing, where he has published more than 100 technical papers and directed over $8M in research funding from NSF, DARPA, AFRL, NIST and various industrial sponsors. He received several best paper awards and nominations in various conferences including GLSVLSI 2016, ICDM 2019, and ICCAD 2019, and 2020. He served as Member of Advisory Committee, Cybersecurity Research and Technology Commercialization in the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2018. Since 2017 he has been serving as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on VLSI. He was the technical program co-chair of GLSVLSI 2018 and the general chair of 2019 conference.