Edward G. Suh
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Masschusetts Instititute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts
March 2 (Wednesday), 2005 at 10:00 a.m.
2405 Siebel Center for Computer Science
The Internet is expanding into the physical world, connecting billions of devices. In this expanded network, two contradictory trends are appearing.
On the one hand, the cost of security breaches is increasing as we place more responsibilities on the devices that surround us. On the other hand, computing elements are becoming small, disseminated, unsupervised, and physically exposed. Unfortunately, existing computing systems do not address physical threats, presenting a significant vulnerability in future embedded systems.
We have built a tamper-resistant platform using a single-chip secure processor called AEGIS. Our platform protects applications from physical attacks as well as software attacks. This enables several applications such as secure sensor networks, certified execution, and copy protection of media and software. This talk will briefly describe the architecture of the AEGIS secure processor and its key primitives, namely, physical unclonable functions and memory integrity verification.
Physical Unclonable Functions (or PUFs) are a tamper resistant way of establishing shared secrets with a physical device. They rely on the inevitable manufacturing variations between devices to produce an identity for a device. This identity is arguably unclonable.
Memory integrity verfication authenticates content stored in external memory, and is essential to build a secure computing system that is powerful enough to run applications requiring large memory. The talk will discuss a memory integrity verification scheme that is efficient and practical.
We have fabricated and tested Physical Unclonable Function chips in TSMC 0.18u technology, and implemented the AEGIS processor on an FPGA.
Bio:
Edward Suh is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has worked in the areas of high performance memory systems, embedded processors, and secure hardware architecture, and has co-authored over a dozen papers in these areas. His current research focuses on computer security, in particular, secure processors and their applications.
Reception after the talk in the 2nd Floor Atrium of Siebel Center.