Secure Hardware Platforms for the Internet of Things (IoT)

ABSTRACT: The Internet is expanding into the physical world, connecting billions of devices. In this Internet of Things, 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, wireless computing elements are becoming small, unsupervised, and physically exposed. Unfortunately, existing systems do not address many new attacks, such as resource sharing and physical attacks. Hardware to the rescue! This talk will describe how secure systems can be built from the ground up. Physical Unclonable Functions (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 private keys that can be used as a hardware root of trust in a secure processor. Architectural isolation can be used to secure computation on a remote secure processor with a private key where the privileged software is potentially malicious as recently deployed by Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX). The Sanctum secure processor architecture offers the same promise as SGX, namely strong provable isolation of software modules running concurrently and sharing resources, but is much more lightweight and protects against an important class of additional software attacks that infer private information by exploiting resource sharing.

BIO: Srini Devadas is the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he has been on the faculty since 1988. Devadas’s research interests span Computer-Aided Design (CAD),
computer security and computer architecture. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM. He has received the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement award, the 2015 ACM/IEEE Richard Newton technical impact award, and the 2017 IEEE Wallace McDowell award for his research. Devadas is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow and an Everett Moore Baker teaching award recipient, considered MIT’s two highest undergraduate teaching honors.

Hosted by: Paul Bogdan