The Need for Computer-Aided Design for System-on-Chip Security Validation

Security vulnerabilities in system-on-chips (SoCs) are due to design mistakes, lack of security understanding, design transformations, various attack surfaces, and malicious intents. Further, existing computer-aided design (CAD) tools used in SoC design flows can introduce additional vulnerabilities in the SoCs unintentionally. Not only will these vulnerabilities move from one level of abstraction to another, but unique vulnerabilities can also be introduced during design transformations. In this talk, we will talk about the importance of having automatic CAD solutions to be able to analyze the security of SoCs in a comprehensive manner, at all levels of abstractions, and against all existing threats (e.g., fault-injection, side-channel, and hardware Trojan attacks). CAD tools should be designed in a way that is able to access the security of the design in the pre-silicon stage and suggest possible countermeasures while it is still, possible to modify the design and address the potential vulnerabilities.

Farimah Farahmandi

Assistant Professor, University of Florida on March 24, 2023 at 10:15 AM in EB3 2207

Dr. Farahmandi is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the associate director of Edaptive Computing Inc., Transition Center (ECI-TC), and Florida Institue for Cybersecurity (FICS) at the University of Florida. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the University of Florida, 2018. Her research interests include hardware security verification, formal methods, fault-injection attack analysis, side-channel leakage assessment, information leakage, secure physical design, secure supply chain of microelectronics, and post-silicon validation and debugging. Her research has resulted in five books, nine book chapters, and several publications in premier ACM/IEEE journals and conferences including IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on CAD, Design Automation Conference (DAC), and Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE). Her research has been recognized by several awards including the 2022 Semiconductor Research Corporation Young Faculty Award and the 2022 ECE Research Excellence Award at UF. She is also the recipient of four best paper nominations from IEEE/ACM ASP-DAC and IEEE/ACM DATE. She also has served on many technical program committees as well as organizing committees of premier ACM and IEEE conferences. Currently, she is the program chair of IEEE HOST 2023. Her research has been sponsored by SRC, DARPA, AFRL, DoD, ONR, Analog Devices, ANSYS, Synopsys, and Cisco. She is a member of IEEE and ACM.

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