Abstract
Hardware trojans (HTs) represent one of the most challenging threat models in computer security. Due to the complexity and distributed nature of today’s electronics supply chains, there has been significant interest in developing scalable and accurate techniques for identifying such embedded malicious logic, at least in critical systems. However, much of the research in such techniques focuses on small target circuits with impractical HT usage (i.e., attack) scenarios, leading to both to questionable defenses and potential blind spots. In particular, most scenarios ascribe perfect knowledge and embedding control to the HT owner, consider simple (verging on simplistic) trigger and payload mechanisms, and cast the HT-attacker-defender interaction as a single shot game.
In this talk, I will discuss a new model for hardware trojans that targets realistic circuits (i.e., full-blown CPUs) in the context of imperfect knowledge/control by the attacker and an adaptive defender within a repeated game, and explore certain implications and technical challenges.
Brief Biography
Dr. Angelos D. Keromytis is Professor, John H. Weitnauer, Jr. Chair, and Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His field of research is systems and network security, and applied cryptography.
He came to Georgia Tech from DARPA, where he served as Program Manager in the Information Innovation Office (I2O) from 2014 to 2018. During that time, he initiated five major research initiatives in cybersecurity and managed a portfolio of nine programs, and supervised technology transitions and partnerships with numerous elements of the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, Law Enforcement, and other parts of the U.S. government. For his work, he received the DAPRA Superior Public Service Medal, and the Results Matter Award. Prior to DARPA, he served as Program Director with the Computer and Network Systems Division in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science & Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where he co-managed the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program and helped initiate a number of cross-disciplinary and public-private programs. Prior to his public service tour, Dr. Keromytis was a faculty member with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he founded the Network Security Lab.
Dr. Keromytis is an elected Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He has 63 issued U.S. patents and over 300 refereed publications. His work has been cited almost 30,000 times, with an h-index of 85 and i10-index of 260. He has founded four startup companies. He received his Ph.D. (2001) and M.Sc. (1997) in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Crete, Greece. He is a certified PADI Master Instructor, with over 700 dives.