Research Statement Jeyavijayan ( JV ) Rajendran 1 Motivation

1 Motivation Electronic devices are increasingly used for high-performance applications, such as data centers and networking, as well as energy-constrained applications, such as medical implants and sensors. In many of these applications, security and privacy of user data and computation are required and are usually enforced in software. However, enforcing security and privacy in hardware has gained importance in the recent years because of energy efficiency and performance benefits. Furthermore, to leverage the benefits of latest technologies and techniques, there has been a continuous trend away from in-house integrated circuit (IC) design and fabrication toward outsourcing various aspects of design, fabrication, testing, and packaging of ICs. This globalization of IC design flow has created hitherto unknown security and trust concerns in the ICs, and, thereby, in the computing systems (rooted in these ICs) on which modern society relies for mission-critical functionality. Anywhere in this design flow, an attacker can reverse engineer the functionality of an IC and/or an intellectual property (IP) as well as steal and claim ownership of the IP. An untrusted IC foundry may overbuild ICs and sell the excess parts in the gray market. Rogue elements in the foundry may insert malicious circuits (hardware Trojans) into the design without the designer’s knowledge. My research addresses the security problems in IC design by developing novel design automation algorithms and circuit techniques to ensure the trustworthiness of an IC. I will discuss two major themes of my research in this area: (1) hardware design-for-trust techniques to enforce trustworthiness in an IC design, and (2) leveraging emerging technologies for security applications.