Events

Hardware Root of Compliance: Compiling Regulation into Hardware Invariants

Electrical and Computer Engineering
Lecture / Panel
 
Open to the Public
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Speaker

Dimitrios Serpanos
President of the Computer Technology Institute DIOPHANTUS and Professor at the University of Patras in Greece

Title

"Hardware Root of Compliance: Compiling Regulation into Hardware Invariants"

Abstract

Unattended smart-city edge nodes host real-time AI analytics and safety-critical actuators, and are vulnerable to dynamic runtime attacks (control-flow hijacking, memory corruption, rogue physical I/O) that classical boot-time roots of trust (SRTM, DRTM) cannot observe after initialization. Also, EU regulation (the Cyber Resilience Act and AI Act) places obligations (continuous monitoring, tamper-evident logging, resilience to exploitation, and time-bounded incident reporting) which are themselves runtime in nature. We introduce the Hardware Root of Compliance (HRoC), an architecture-independent component that compiles a delimited subset of such obligations into continuously checked, tamper-evident hardware invariants transmitting signed evidence at execution time, under an explicit soundness-with-coverage discipline. We formalize hardware-rootability, map CRA and AI Act provisions to invariants, and present the CRA Article 14 early-warning duty end to end. We describe HRoC in the CERTOR (Compliance Engine for Regulatory Trust & Obligation Recording) design, a non-intrusive attestation co-processor with autonomous physical enforcement, and we set out the resulting research agenda.

About Speaker

Dimitrios Serpanos is President of the Computer Technology Institute DIOPHANTUS and Professor at the University of Patras in Greece.
He holds a Phd in Computer Science from Princeton University (1990) and and engineering degree in computer engineering and informatics from the University of Patras (1985).
He was Research Staff Member at IBM Research and held research positions at Telcordia Technologies and Qatar Computing Research Institute.
D. Serpanos has served as President of the University of Western Greece and as Director of the Industrial Systems Institute in Patras, Greece.
His research interests include embedded and cyberphysical systems, and cybersecurity.

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