Speaker: Dr. Sandip Ray
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Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) regime arguably began about a decade back, when the number of connected computing devices exceeded the human population. Today our environment includes billions of connected devices, coordinating and communicating to implement applications of the scale of intelligent homes, self-driving automobiles, and smart cities. The trend is towards even more proliferation of these devices with estimates of trillions within the next 15 years, representing the fastest growth for any sector at any time in the human history. Security and trustworthiness are critical requirements for computing systems in IoT applications. In particular, these systems track, collect, and analyze some of our most private, personal information including health, sleep patterns, browsing patterns, etc. In addition, the system may contain other sensitive assets built-in by the manufacturer, e.g., cryptographic and DRM keys, fuses, etc. It is crucial to ensure that all such sensitive information is protected from malicious, unauthorized access. Consequently, a significant component of development of a modern System-on-Chip (SoC) design is expended on architecting, designing, and validating security mechanisms.
In this talk, we will look at security assurance challenges and approaches for SoC designs targeted for Internet-of-Things applications. Security assurance mechanisms in current industrial practice is a highly complex activity, spanning the entire system life-cycle, and involving trade-offs and collaboration among a large number of stake-holders. Furthermore, IoT applications such as smart homes and automobiles have a long device life and critical in-field configurability and adaptation requirements. Finally, many traditional security solutions do not work for these systems due to constraints arising from unique form factor requirements, aggressive energy budget, etc. We will discuss the gaps between the current state of the practice and the assurance requirements, and some of the research initiatives undertaken to bridge these gaps. Research in the area marries several topics in computer science and engineering, including architecture, power/performance management, hardware/software co-design, and verification. We will present a new security architecture to enable flexible, disciplined implementation of System-on-Chip security requirements. We will discuss novel approaches to map this security architecture to a configurable hardware platform, and demonstrate its viability to address requirements from validation, security-energy trade-offs, and secure in-field requirements update. The talk will give a flavor of the nature of the cross-cutting, collaborative research necessary to develop trustworthy computing devices in the IoT era.
Bio: Dr. Sandip Ray is a Principal Engineer at NXP Semiconductors, where he leads a large cross-collaborative research team that focuses on developing security architecture and validation for automotive and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. His research primarily involves developing correct, dependable, secure, and trustworthy computing through cooperation of specification, synthesis, architecture and validation technologies. Before joining NXP, Dr. Ray was a Research Scientist at Strategic CAD Labs, Intel Corporation where he led the research on pre-silicon and post-silicon validation of security and functional correctness of Intel’s next-generation SoC designs, design-for-security and design-for-debug architectures, CAD tools, and specifications for security assurance. Dr. Ray is the author of three books (two upcoming) and over 60 publications in peer-reviewed premier international journals and conferences. He was a guest editor for an IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Systems (TMSCS) special issue on Wearables, Implants, and Internet-of-Things, as well as special issues of ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) and Springer Journal on Electronic Testing Theory and Applications (JETTA). His research has found applications in a number of companies, including AMD, Freescale, Galois, IBM, Intel, NXP, and Rockwell Collins. He has received several recognition awards from Intel for his extensive contribution in the field of security architecture and validation. He has given invited, tutorial, and keynote presentations at several international forums on security, validation, and energy challenges in the IoT regime. Dr. Ray serves as NXP representative in Semiconductor Research Consortium (SRC) technical advisory board on security and verification. Prior to joining Intel, as a Research Scientist at University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Ray led several sponsored projects from DARPA, SRC, and National Science Foundation, as a Principal Investigator. He has served as a program committee member more than 40 international meetings and conferences, and as program chair for Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE TMSCS and Springer Journal on Hardware and Systems Security. He has a Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin and is a Senior Member of IEEE.