Physical assurance for advanced packaging

Speaker 

Dr. Navid Asadi is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Florida with an affiliation to the Materials Science and Engineering Department.

Abstract

Advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration have made the semiconductor industry more complicated and susceptible to trust and security issues. Hardware Trojans, i.e., malicious modification to electronic systems, can violate the root of trust when the device or systems are fabricated/assembled in untrusted facilities. As the imaging and failure analysis tools excel in resolution and capability, physical inspection-based methods become more attractive in verifying such trust issues. On the contrary, such physical inspection methods are opening new capabilities for an adversary to extract sensitive information like secret keys, memory content or intellectual property (IP) compromising confidentiality and integrity. Different countermeasures have been proposed, however, there are still many unanswered questions. This talk will focus on the state-of-the-art physical inspection/assurance methods, the existing countermeasures, related challenges to develop new countermeasures and a research roadmap for this emerging field.

Biography

Dr. Navid Asadi is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Florida with an affiliation to the Materials Science and Engineering department. He investigates novel techniques for electronics inspection and assurance, system and chip level decomposition and security assessment, anti-reverse engineering, 3D imaging, invasive and semi-invasive methods, supply chain security, etc. Dr. Asadi is director of the Security and Assurance (SCAN) lab house to more than $12M advanced imaging and characterization equipment. He also serves as the associate director of the Florida Semiconductor Institute (FSI), and the Microelectronics Security Training (MEST) center which is a multi-million dollar program to train and reskill the professional engineers in the area of security. Dr. Asadi  has received his NSF CAREER award in 2022 and several best paper awards from IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) and the ASME International Symposium on Flexible Automation (ISFA). He was also winner of D.E. Crow Innovation award from University of Connecticut. He is also the general chair of the IEEE Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics (PAINE) Conference. His projects are sponsored by various government agencies and industry including but not limited to NSF, AFRL, AFOSR, ONR, SRC, Meta, Cisco, Analog Devices, etc.