Baking Security into Chips

 A former Alma Mater of mine is putting a security brain into Chips: 

THE ART OF THE DESIGN: UF COMPUTER ENGINEERS’ BAKED-IN ‘SECURITY BRAIN’ TECHNOLOGY HAS MICROCHIPS DEFENDING THEMSELVES

In Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Featured, News, Research & InnovationMarch 10, 2022  from the U of F

SANDIP RAY, PH.D., IOT TERM PROFESSOR, AND SWARUP BHUNIA, PH.D., SEMMOTO ENDOWED PROFESSOR OF IOT, BOTH FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING, WITH PATCHABLE HARDWARE SETUP

The epiphany that emerged from UF engineering professors Swarup Bhunia and Sandip Ray was such a game-changing proposal that IEEE Spectrum, the flagship news magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, insisted that they coauthor an October 2017 feature article to unveil the concept to their two million print and online subscribers.

With the rapid proliferation of all things ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) — the realm of smart or automated objects and devices that are interconnected or exchange data via the Internet — a necessary, cost-effective microchip security solution has followed. The answer posed by Dr. Bhunia, Ph.D., director of Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World and Semmoto Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Dr. Ray, Ph.D., Endowed IoT Term Professor in ECE, seemed an impossibility, or at least a misnomer: ‘patchable hardware.’ But the breakthrough may actually be what the industry was waiting for.

“Hardware, microchips, are not patchable,” Dr. Bhunia said. “Once they’re designed, you can’t fix their security problems.” He and Dr. Ray observed that industrial chip security protocol was ad hoc and reactive — finding a problem, then fixing it in the next iteration, with no protection against potential unknown attacks. In time, industry experts realized that was an expensive proposition. “Any time you get a security attack, what do you do? There is no other recourse but a product recall, which will cost billions of dollars. Industry has done it that way forever.”

But the two conceived a novel approach six years prior, when Dr. Ray was with the Intel Corporation. The initial thrust of their research, which found its inspiration by mimicking the self-regulating function of the human brain, recently found its way into a research program for the Department of Defense (DoD), called Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS). With $2.4 million in funding from industry research partner and prime contractor Northrop Grumman, the UF co-investigators successfully capped their four-year chip design research work with a revolutionized microchip security, making it part of the intuitive, patchable hardware.

THE PATCHABLE HARDWARE SETUP IN DETAIL

“This is a paradigm change, not in fabrication or in the production process, but the design architecture; the chip itself handles all the security aspects,” Dr. Bhunia said. “Our investigation in the DARPA/DoD grant has two related, critical aspects. First, it explores the concept of ‘security brain’ — a plug-and-play module that can be inserted into modern microchips to account for all their security needs. It acts as a central agent responsible for track-and-trace-control of all security-critical activities. Second, this security brain is patchable, meaning it can be upgraded when needed to meet evolving security requirements.”  .... '