Title: When "Security" Meets "Hardware": A Bidirectional and Evolving View of Hardware Security Challenges and Solutions
Abstract: Integrated circuits (ICs) are the fundamental building blocks of essentially all computer or electronic systems. While outsourcing has become a trend in the IC industry to reduce the manufacturing cost, an untrusted foundry may compromise the security of the manufactured ICs, such as embedding hardware Trojans. Due to the presence of process variation and the huge numbers of transistors, the traditional system or software security mechanisms cannot address the hardware security challenges. In this talk, I will first introduce a consistency-based IC characterization approach to detect and diagnose hardware Trojans via power side channels, with a focus on addressing the challenges of scalability and lack of golden models. Then, built on top of the top-down “security-ofhardware” perspective, I will present my more recent research of hardware security from a bottom-up (i.e., “hardware-for-security”) direction, which employs low level hardware security primitives, such as hardware isolation, to address system and software security challenges. I will demonstrate that the “hardware-for-security” perspective provides a critical layer of system protection, which evolves the pure security inspection with a failsafe and dependability consideration in the hardware security solutions. Finally, I will conclude the talk by showing that my bidirectional view and practice in hardware security have the potential of addressing practical security challenges in cyber physical systems (CPS) and the emerging CPU-FPGA heterogeneous systems.
Bio: Dr. Sheng Wei has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) since Fall 2015. Before that, he was a Research Scientist at Adobe Research for two years. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2013. His research has been mainly focused on Hardware Security, which aims to protect the security and integrity of low-level hardware systems (namely “security of hardware”), as well as employ hardware-based techniques to enhance system and software security (namely “hardware for security”). He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2018 under the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program. Also, his recent research work has been recognized by the community with a Best Paper Award at IEEE ICCD 2016 and Best Paper Nominations at IEEE HOST 2018, ACM MM 2016, and DAC 2014.