IoT Security

Instructor 

Dr. Ujjwal Guin is a Godbold Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Auburn University, and Dr. Md Tauhidur Rahman, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Eng, Florida International University, Miami, Florida

Learning Objectives

The IoT Security micro-certificate course provides a comprehensive and application-driven introduction to securing modern Internet of Things (IoT) systems, with a strong emphasis on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), hardware-level threats, and practical authentication mechanisms. Designed for students, engineers, and researchers, this course bridges foundational concepts with advanced security challenges in connected and embedded systems. This course covers four major topics in four units described below.

• Unit 1: Introduction to UAVs: Participants are introduced to UAVs (drones) as a critical IoT platform. The unit covers UAV types and real-world applications, system architecture, onboard components, communication modules, and emerging security vulnerabilities. Learners will understand how UAVs operate within IoT ecosystems and where security risks arise across hardware, firmware, and communication layers.
• Unit 2: Hardware Security of Drones : It focuses on hardware security in drones. It provides background on UAV hardware, firmware, and system architecture, followed by an in-depth exploration of hardware Trojans—their design, insertion points, and potential impact on UAV functionality and safety. Students will examine practical techniques for hardware Trojan modeling and detection, gaining insight into threat modeling at the silicon and system levels.
• Unit 3: Robust, Low-Cost and Secure Authentication Scheme for IoT Applications: Learners explore robust and low-cost authentication schemes for IoT devices, with emphasis on zero-knowledge proof–based authentication. The course walks through a step-by-step secure device verification workflow, demonstrating how to design scalable and lightweight authentication for constrained IoT environments.
• Unit 4: Supplimentry Lectures: This unit features expert-led presentations covering IoT security and forensics, emerging hardware security frontiers, and firmware-level defense strategies.

Learning outcomes:

After taking the course, students will be able to:

1. Explain the architecture, components, and applications of UAV-based IoT systems.
2. Identify and analyze security vulnerabilities in UAV hardware, firmware, and communication layers.
3. Describe the design, insertion, and impact of hardware Trojans in drone platforms.
4. Evaluate hardware Trojan detection techniques for embedded and UAV systems.
5. Compare traditional PUF-based authentication schemes with privacy-preserving alternatives.
6. Explain how zero-knowledge proofs and zk-SNARKs enable secure device authentication without exposing PUF responses.
7. Apply a step-by-step zero-knowledge–based authentication workflow for secure IoT edge device verification.

Prerequisites:

• Basic understanding of hardware design, embedded system design, and hardware security concepts
• Familiarity with hardware trojan, Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), and secure authentication.
• MEST Micro-certificate: Hardware Trojans (recommended)
• MEST Micro-certificate: Security Primitives I – Introduction to Physical Unclonable Functions (recommended)
• MEST Micro-certificate: Security Primitives II – Physical Unclonable Function Architectures (recommended)

Target Audience

Designed for U.S. citizens working in the Department of War, Government, or Government-affiliated employees, industry, as well as college students and faculty. Must register with your organizational email, and will be notified of acceptance within one week of the course start date

Biography

Ujjwal Guin is a Godbold Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Auburn University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 2016. He is actively engaged in research projects spanning hardware security and trust, supply chain security, cybersecurity, and VLSI design and testing. He has developed several on-chip structures and techniques to enhance the security, trustworthiness, and reliability of integrated circuits. His contributions include authoring one book, two book chapters, thirty journal articles, and more than forty refereed conference papers. His research has been widely recognized through best paper nominations, awards, research grants, and prizes from various security competitions. Notably, one of his papers was referenced in the White House 100-Day Reviews under the EO 14017 report, specifically in the “Building Resilient Supply Chains” section, published in June 2021. Dr. Guin’s research projects are funded by the U.S. Army, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Secret Service, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). He served on the technical program committees of several prestigious conferences, including DAC, ITC, HOST, VTS, PAINE, VLSID, GLSVLSI, ISVLSI, and Blockchain. He is currently the Technical Program Co-Chair of HOST 2025. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM.

Dr. Tauhidur Rahman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Florida International University (FIU). He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida in 2017 (advised by Dr. Mark Tehranipoor). He is the recipient of NSF CRII and the director of the SeRLoP (Security, Reliability, Low-power, and Privacy) Research lab. His research interests include hardware security and trust, side-channel analysis, and embedded security. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Defense (DoD), and CyberFlorida.