AI for hardware security: Friend or Foe

Speaker

Lejla Batina
Professor, Radboud University, Netherlands.

Title

"AI for hardware security: Friend or Foe"

Abstract

Side-channel analysis has changed the field of cryptography and security and it became the most common cause of real-world security applications failing today. In this talk we give an overview of side-channel attacks on implementations of cryptography and countermeasures. We discuss the ways Machine learning and AI changed the side-channel analysis landscape and attackers’ capabilities in particular. We survey several examples of AI assisting physical attackers and discuss the impact of AI on the field of hardware security. We also describe the way side-channel analysis can assist the AI model stealing by reverse engineering commercial neural nets architectures. In the end, we identify some avenues for future research

About Speaker

Lejla Batina is a professor in embedded systems security at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She received her Ph.D. from KU Leuven, Belgium (2005) and prior to that she worked as a cryptographer for Pijnenburg Securealink in The Netherlands (2001–2003). She has coauthored more than 170 refereed articles on various topics in applied cryptography and embedded system security. Her current research interests include physical attacks on cryptographic implementations and the impact of AI on hardware security. 

She is a senior member of IEEE and an Editorial board member of top journals in security, such as IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security and ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems. She was program co-chair of CHES 2014, ACM WiSec 2021, Africacrypt 2022, SPACE 2020-2022, ACNS2024 and she co-organized (as general chair) IACR flagship conferences such as EUROCRYPT (2020-2021) and Real-world crypto symposium (RWC) 2022. Her research group at Radboud consists of 10+ researchers and 12 Ph.D. students have so far graduated under her supervision.