Tufts hosts New England Hardware Security Day

At Tufts, researchers are thinking about cybersecurity from all angles. Just as websites and computer software can be hacked, hardware such as computer chips, computer processing units, microprocessors, and firmware is also vulnerable to attack. This was the focus of the sixth New England Hardware Security Day, hosted on the Tufts campus. The event brought together members of industry and academia to discuss key issues in hardware security.

Karol Family Professor and Dean of the School of Engineering Kyongbum Lee provided opening remarks at the start of the day, followed by Associate Professor Yingjie Lao. “Hardware remains both a foundation and a point of vulnerability,” Lao said during his remarks. His statement resonated throughout the day’s events, which included a panel, two keynote speakers, and poster session. 

Policy is a critical part of the hardware security puzzle. Hardware development, manufacturing, and distribution often happen in different countries, that each have different security regulations. An international panel featuring researchers from India, China, Germany, and the U.S. spoke about their geopolitical aspects of cybersecurity and how each region can work together to design and build safer hardware.

This year’s gathering built on discussions and research presented at previous meetings. In the first keynote lecture, Professor Ryan Katsner of the University of California, San Diego, outlined a framework for scalable hardware security verification. The current system of checking security measures on hardware is time-consuming and relies heavily on manual labor. Katsner’s lecture suggested ways to make the process more efficient.

The second keynote, delivered by Professor Yuval Yarom of Ruhr University Bochum, explored positive uses for microarchitectural races—which are conditions that can lead to unexpected results in computing. These vulnerabilities were exploited in the 2018 Meltdown and Spectre attacks, but Yarom demonstrated some more positive uses including code obfuscation, augmenting cache attacks, and reverse engineering.

For the first time, talks presenting original research were eligible for publication in the Journal of Cryptographic Engineering (JCEN). Among the 11 talks presented at the event, five received JCEN requests.

“Our goal was to strengthen regional connections and highlight emerging security challenges at the intersection of hardware, systems, and AI, and it was exciting to see that reflected in the talks, panels, poster sessions, as well as the strong engagement throughout the day,” said Lao.

Associate Professor Yingjie Lao and Assistant Professor Marco Donato, both of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, served as the chairs for this year’s conference. Tufts sponsors included the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Tufts Cybersecurity Center for the Public Good with support from the School of Engineering and President Sunil Kumar. Other sponsors included the National Science Foundation, zeroRISC, Draper, the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC), and Analog Devices.