Hardware Security and the Future: Why Should You Care?

Hardware Security and the Future: Why Should You Care?

The response to a security flaw typically goes through three phases: first, it is ignored, then it is acknowledged but claimed to never happen in a real-world system, and finally, it is argued to be known all along with defenses underway. Physical side-channel analysis has come a long way since its inception in the 90s, going through all these phases. Over the past two decades, several attacks and related defenses have appeared, resulting in hundreds of academic papers and a multi-billion dollar market. But what is the future of physical side-channel analysis? Will the research keep incrementing on the same themes or are there new directions going forward? In this talk, I will briefly overview the existing work and then focus on three aspects I believe to be important for the future of physical side-channel analysis: new applications, new devices/targets, and new means to extract the information. This talk will argue that the broadening scope of physical side-channels will force you to care!

Speaker Bio

Dr. Aydin Aysu is currently an associate professor and University Faculty Fellow at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of North Carolina State University, where he leads HECTOR: Hardware Cybersecurity Research Lab. He got his M.S from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech. Before joining NC State, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Aysu’s interests are broadly in hardware security research and cybersecurity education. His hardware security research has won NSF CAREER, NSF CRII, Google RSP, and Goodnight Innovation Fellow, and Bennett Faculty Fellow awards, six best paper nominations (IACR TCHES, IEEE HOST, DATE, GLS-VLSI), two best paper awards, two hardware security top picks (IEEE CEDA), and one publicity paper award (DAC). He is an IEEE senior member.