New Emerging Attacks in Hardware Security: Embedded Systems to ML Accelerators

Speaker

Urbi Chatterjee
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Title

"New Emerging Attacks in Hardware Security: Embedded Systems to ML Accelerators"

Abstract

In the past decade, the field of hardware security has grown into a major research topic, attracting intense interest from academics, industry and governments alike. Currently, under the initiate of “Make-in-India”, a drive has been taken to develop, manufacture, and assemble semiconductor products made in India and incentivize dedicated investments into manufacturing. With the demand for electronic hardware expected to rise rapidly, India has the potential to become an electronic manufacturing hub. However, as with most emerging technologies, innovation is prioritized, and security is an afterthought in response to discovered vulnerabilities.

In this talk, we are going to bridge this gap and highlight some key findings that can impact the security aspects of embedded systems. We will start with how a simple stethoscope can disassemble the instructions running on a simple Arduino board mounting ATmega328P microcontroller or a Raspberry Pi consisting of ARM processor using acoustic side channel analysis (SCA). These devices are widely used in edge computing and industrial applications, hence pose immense threats against acoustic SCA. Subsequently we will delve into our contributions in timing SCA on network-on-chip architecture which is coming up as an emerging network-based communications subsystem in Multiprocessor System-on-Chips. Finally the talk will shifts to approximate hardware circuits that are widely used now-a-days in ML/AI accelerators and show how digital Hardware Trojan Horses can exploit the probabilistic nature of approximate designs to reduce the end applications accuracy drastically.

About Speaker

Urbi Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. She received her MTech degree from IIT(ISM) Dhanbad in 2013 and PhD from IIT Kharagpur in 2020. She has also worked in industry for one and half years. Her broad area of research is Hardware Security. She currently works on Physically Unclonable Functions, Security Analysis of Approximate Computing Hardware, Timing Side Channel attacks on Network-on-Chip Architecture, Acoustic Side Channel attacks and Bio Chip Security.