picture: Shahin Tajik, assistant professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
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Credit: WPI Photo/Matt Burgos
Worcester, Mass. – May 30, 2024 – Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researcher Shahin Tajik has been awarded a prestigious CAREER Award of $594,081 by the National Science Foundation to develop new applied sciences to watch and shield pc chips and different {hardware} from malicious assaults.
The grant will allow Tajik, assistant professor within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to broaden his analysis into {hardware} safety, a area that focuses on bodily threats to computing techniques that attackers can hijack by tampering with chips, motherboards, and different digital elements touring by means of international provide chains.
“When we speak about pc safety, many individuals will take into consideration hacking assaults that focus on software program vulnerabilities,” Tajik stated. “However, computer systems are fabricated from bodily elements, and they’re susceptible, too. By tampering with chips and motherboards, attackers can basically spy on processed knowledge on chips or disrupt the performance of pc chips. This vulnerability is a vital problem for companies, infrastructure operators, and nationwide safety.”
Computer {hardware} is susceptible to tampering as a result of a number of people and corporations in far-flung places, together with abroad factories, might be concerned within the design, manufacturing, and meeting of pc elements. Ensuring the integrity of elements as they journey by means of provide chains is vital, however tampering might be exhausting to identify.
Tajik’s five-year undertaking will examine applied sciences that might probably thwart {hardware} assaults by creating higher metrics to confirm that a pc’s bodily components are manufactured to design requirements, accurately put in, and working with out interference. He additionally will use info principle to advance understanding about “side-channel assaults,” which contain extracting secrets and techniques from a chip or system utilizing bodily traits of the computing {hardware}. Finally, Tajik will create bodily unclonable capabilities, often known as PUFs, to watch the exercise of chips in computer systems.
The undertaking builds on Tajik’s earlier analysis into using lasers for side-channel assaults on digital techniques and laser-assisted countermeasures. He is a part of a crew that obtained almost $361,000 in NSF funding to accumulate a powerfulmicroscope for {hardware} safety analysis at WPI, and he leads a crew that was awarded almost $1 million in funding from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to accumulate a second microscope and launch a WPI heart centered on semiconductor safety analysis. The heart gives testing companies to enterprise and tutorial researchers to help the semiconductor safety business in Massachusetts.
As a part of his undertaking, Tajik will develop a brand new graduate-level course at WPI on the bodily safety of microelectronic techniques, and he’ll recruit undergraduates to groups that may conduct analysis associated to the undertaking.
“Research into {hardware} safety is fascinating work, like fixing a puzzle after which confronting a good tougher puzzle {that a} hacker has created,” Tajik stated. “It’s additionally necessary work. The bodily layer of computer systems has been missed in safety analysis for a very long time, so we have now an important alternative to discover and search options that may handle an actual want.”
About WPI
WPI is a top-tier STEM-focused analysis college and a acknowledged pioneer and international chief in project-based studying. Founded in 1865 on the precept that college students be taught most successfully by making use of the speculation realized within the classroom to the follow of fixing real-world issues, WPI’s continued mission is to rework lives, flip data into motion to confront international challenges, and revolutionize STEM by means of distinctive and inclusive schooling, tasks, and analysis. WPI’s project-based curriculum engages undergraduates in fixing necessary scientific, technological, and societal issues all through their schooling and at greater than 50 undertaking facilities all over the world. Today WPI gives greater than 70 bachelor’s, grasp’s, and doctoral diploma packages throughout 18 tutorial departments in science, engineering, expertise, enterprise, the social sciences, and the humanities and humanities. Its college and college students pursue groundbreaking analysis to satisfy ongoing challenges in well being and biotechnology; robotics and the web of issues; superior supplies and manufacturing; cyber, knowledge, and safety techniques; studying science; and extra. www.wpi.edu
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https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1046507
