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10 Universities Take NSF Awards To Tackle Secure Semiconductor Research

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/24/14

A joint partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) is funding nine research initiatives at 10 universities to develop new strategies for ensuring the security of semiconductors and other systems. The "Secure, Trustworthy, Assured and Resilient Semiconductors and Systems" (STARSS) initiative aims to decrease the likelihood of unintended behavior or access of that hardware, increase resistance and resilience to tampering, and improve the ability to provide authentication "throughout the supply chain and in the field."

NSF's involvement in STARSS comes as part of its Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace portfolio. The foundation is teaming up with SRC specifically to give researchers access to industry needs and resources, facilitate the transition from theory to practice and give students opportunities to interact with working professionals. SRC is a consortium of companies and universities around the world focused on semiconductor research. The latest initiative is being supported by a number of chip makers: AMD, Freescale, Intel and Mentor Graphics.

The first round of awards, totaling nearly $4 million will be going to the following projects:

• "Combating integrated circuit counterfeiting using secure chip odometers." Carnegie Mellon researchers are designing and testing secure chip "odometers" to add a secure gauge of use/age and an authentication of provenance to integrated circuits in order to uncover counterfeit ICs;
• "Intellectual Property Trust: A comprehensive framework for IP integrity validation." Case Western Reserve and U Florida researchers will develop a framework for the safe use of externally developed "IP blocks," reusable hardware modules used by semiconductor companies for developing new hardware systems;
• "Design of low-cost, memory-based security primitives and techniques for high-volume products." U Connecticut researchers will develop metrics and algorithms to make static RAM physical "unclonable" functions that are more reliable, especially in high-volume production scenarios;
• "Trojan detection and diagnosis in mixed-signal systems using on-the-fly learned, pre-computed and side channel tests." Georgia Tech researchers will develop techniques, algorithms and support infrastructure for detecting, diagnosing and mitigating the effects of Trojans in a variety of circuits that can cause system malfunction after deployment in the field;
• "Metric and CAD for differential power analysis resistance." Iowa State researchers will investigate metrics and design techniques to make embedded hardware less vulnerable to "side channel" attacks;
• "Design of secure and anti-counterfeit integrated circuits." U Minnesota researchers will develop new approaches for embedding authentication into chips;
• "Hardware authentication through high-capacity, physical unclonable functions (PUFs)-based secret key generation and lattice coding." U Texas at Austin researchers will develop strong machine learning-resistant PUFs to attain security properties that are superior to existing designs;
• "Fault-attack awareness using microprocessor enhancements." Virginia Tech researchers will develop a collection of hardware techniques for microprocessor architectures to detect and mitigate fault injection attacks; and
• "Invariant carrying machine for hardware assurance." Northwestern U researchers will develop techniques for improving the reliability and trustworthiness of hardware systems via an "Invariant-Carrying Machine" approach.

"The processes and tools used to design and manufacture semiconductors ensure that the resulting product does what it is supposed to do. However, a key question that must also be addressed is whether the product does anything else, such as behaving in ways that are unintended or malicious," said Keith Marzullo, division director of NSF's Computer and Network Systems Division, which leads the NSF/SRC STARSS partnership. "Through this partnership with SRC, we are pleased to focus on hardware and systems security research addressing this challenge and to provide a unique opportunity to facilitate the transition of this research into practical use."