Applications of Embedded, High-Resolution On-Chip Instrumentation for Hardware Security and Trust

Speaker 

Dr. Jim Plusquellic is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of New Mexico and President and CEO, IC-Safety.

Abstract

Embedded, high-resolution, on-chip instrumentation (EI) can be used to measure path delays, voltage drops, and even voltage transients, for applications to manufacturing test, design for manufacturability, and hardware security and trust. In this talk, I describe several novel hardware security primitives, called physical unclonable functions (PUFs), which leverage EI to obtain high-resolution path delays and voltage drops, as well as techniques that calibrate for adverse environmental effects and undesirable sources of process variation, as a means of isolating and enhancing the level of entropy available to PUFs for encryption key and authentication bitstring generation. Beyond PUFs, EI can detect malicious circuits, a.k.a. hardware Trojans, for detecting invasive probing attacks designed to inject faults or steal confidential information, supply chain provenance, secure boot and security, and trust functions within 3D packaging infrastructures. The potential of EI for expanding capabilities related to these types of hardware security and trust roles is described.

Biography

Professor Plusquellic received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1995 and 1997, respectively. He is currently a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of New Mexico. His research interests are in the area of nano-scale VLSI and include security and trust in IC hardware, embedded system design, supply chain and IoT security and trust, silicon validation, design for manufacturability, and delay test methods. Professor Plusquellic received an “Outstanding Contribution Award” from the IEEE Computer Society in 2012 for co-founding and his contributions to the Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), and again recently in 2017 for “Co-Founder of and providing Outstanding Contributions to the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) for the Past Ten Years 2008-2017”. He is the Trust and Assurance Lead for ASU’s ME COMMONS (SWAP) Hub since July 2024. He served as General Chair for HOST in 2010, as Program Chair for HOST in 2008, 2009, and 2020, and as panelist and moderator for panels at HOST 2020. He has served as Associate Editor for Transactions on Computers and is
currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Hardware Security for Cryptography, MDPI. He has recently been inducted into the HOST Hall-of-Fame and has authored or co-authored three book chapters for Springer Link on the topics of PUF-based Authentication and Hardware Trojan Detection. He received the “10 Years of Continuous Service Award” from the International Test Conference, a Best Paper Award from VTS, an ACM Distinguished Service Award from SIGDA, and two Austin CAS Fellow Awards from IBM. He received the “Albuquerque lab-to-business accelerator” award in 2016, the “2014 Innovation Award” from the Science and Technology Center at the University of New Mexico, was a “Featured Entrepreneur” within the School of Engineering, and has multiple patents and provisional applications filed with the US. Patent and Trademark Office. Professor Plusquellic is President and CEO of IC-Safety, LLC, and a consultant for Enthentica Inc., both start-ups in the hardware security and trust space. He has published more than 140 refereed conference and journal papers. He is a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society.