Long-Lasting Security for Integrated Circuits

Abstract: With the aggressive scaling of VLSI technology and moving towards smaller feature sizes, various design robustness concerns continue to arise. Among them, aging effects in CMOS devices are one of the major challenges in nanotechnologies. Aging changes the specifications of transistors over time and in turn, the timing and power consumption of the underlying devices.

Although aging mechanisms and related mitigation schemes have received the lion’s share of attention from the reliability perspective in recent years, their impact on the security of devices, in particular cryptographic devices, is yet to be investigated thoroughly. However, in practice, such aging-induced change of the delay and power consumption of the device can affect the success of the attacks built upon exploiting unintentional leakages from the device such as its power consumption or timing characteristics.

This talk first focuses on the aging-induced security concerns in cryptographic devices and how aging can affect the success of the physical attacks targeting these devices. Then a number of aging-resilient security solutions are presented.

Bio: Naghmeh Karimi is currently an associate professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Maryland Baltimore County where she leads the SECure, REliable and Trusted Systems (SECRETS) research lab. She received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 2010. She was a visiting researcher at Yale University in 2007-2009, a post-doctoral researcher at Duke University and New York University in 2011-2014, and a visiting assistant professor at Rutgers University in 2014-2016.

Dr. Karimi’s research has been supported by NSF, AFRL, ARL, Northrop Grumman, NIST, and other agencies. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2020. She also received the Early Career Faculty Excellence Award in 2023 from the College of Engineering & Information Technology at UMBC. She has received the second place award in the Digital Trust competition held by International Cyber Security Center of Excellence in 2022, the first and second place award in the Hardware Demo Competition of the IEEE HOST conference in 2023 and 2022, respectively and the second place award in the Embedded Security Challenge Competition in 2018.

Dr. Karimi’s current research interests include Hardware Security and Design-for-Trust, Fault Tolerance and Design-for-Reliability, VLSI Testing and Design-for-Testability, Machine Learning for Security, and Security & Reliability of Machine Learning Hardware. She has published four book chapters and authored/co-authored over 90 papers in referred conference proceedings and journal manuscripts. She serves as an Associate Editor of the Springer Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications (JETTA) as well as IEEE Design & Test Journal. She has been the corresponding guest editor of the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems (JETCAS); special issue in Hardware Security in Emerging Technologies in 2021. She is the program chair of VTS Conference 2024 and the vice program chair of HOST 2024. She has been serving on the program committee of several major conferences in the field of hardware design, reliability, and security including DAC, DATE, ICCAD, CHES, HOST, ITC, VTS, ETS, ATS, VLSI Design, etc. She has been also serving as the program chair, vice program chair, tutorial chair, special session chair, Ph.D. thesis competition chair, and in other roles in major conferences in recent years