Title: Trust, but Tolerate and Verify: Ecosystem of Technologies for Trusted Microelectronics 

Abstract:
In the new era of intelligent connectivity, electronic devices have gained unprecedented access to our daily lives. However, the economic advantage of outsourcing the design, fabrication, and assembly process of electronic components has driven the semiconductor industry to rely on various foreign vendors across the globe. These untrusted vendors can introduce stealthy, malicious modifications to the hardware design, also known as hardware Trojans, to cause a functional failure or leak secret information during field operation. Even after deployment, the hardware design is vulnerable to various invasive in-field attacks by malicious end-users that can disrupt trusted execution.
In this talk, I will present an ecosystem of technologies that can verify the trustworthiness of the hardware designs before deployment and integrate the ability to tolerate various attacks in the field. First, I will outline the security and trust issues in the integrated circuit (IC) lifecycle. Next, I will present two solutions to verify the trustworthiness of ICs that can identify hardware Trojans before deployment, in both pre-silicon and post-silicon stages of the supply chain. Similarly, for post-deployment phases, I will present two solutions. The first one enables Trojan-tolerant computing in the field that can be used as the last line of defense for applications where trust verification is not feasible. The next technology in the ecosystem is developed to protect reconfigurable hardware that is vulnerable to tampering of its bitstream in the field. I will illustrate how a machine learning guided hardware obfuscation method can enable tamper-tolerance in reconfigurable hardware. In conclusion, I will discuss the future security challenges that I intend to address to establish hardware as the trust anchor for emerging applications.