EFFICIENT HARDWARE PRIMITIVES FOR SECURING LIGHTWEIGHT SYSTEMS

In the era of IoT and ubiquitous computing, the collection and communication of sensitive data is increasingly being handled by lightweight Integrated Circuits. Efficient hardware implementations of crytographic primitives for resource constrained applications have become critical, especially block ciphers which perform fundamental operations such as encryption, decryption, and even hashing. We study the efficiency of block ciphers under different implementation styles. For low latency applications that use unrolled block cipher implementations, we design a glitch filter to reduce energy consumption. For lightweight applications, we design a novel architecture for the widely used AES cipher. The design eliminates inefficiencies in data movement and clock activity, thereby significantly improving energy efficiency over state-of-the-art architectures. Apart from efficiency, vulnerability to implementation attacks are a concern, which we mitigate by our randomization capable lightweight AES architecture. We fabricate our designs in a commercial 16nm FinFET technology and present measured testchip data on energy consumption and side channel resistance. Finally, we address the problem of supply chain security by using image processing techniques to extract fingerprints from surface texture of plastic IC packages for IC authentication and counterfeit prevention. Collectively these works present efficient and cost effective solutions to secure lightweight systems

The Design, modeling and simulation of switching fabrics: For an ATM network switch

The requirements of today\u27s telecommunication systems to support high bandwidth and added flexibility brought about the expansion of (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) ATM as a new method of high-speed data transmission. Various analytical and simulation methods may be used to estimate the performance of ATM switches. Analytical methods considerably limit the range of parameters to be evaluated due to extensive formulae used and time consuming iterations. They are not as effective for large networks because of excessive computations that do not scale linearly with network size. One the other hand, simulation-based methods allow determining a bigger range of performance parameters in a shorter amount of time even for large networks. A simulation model, however, is more elaborate in terms of implementation. Instead of using formulae to obtain results, it has to operate software or hardware modules requiring a certain amount of effort to create. In this work simulation is accomplished by utilizing the ATM library - an object oriented software tool, which uses software chips for building ATM switches. The distinguishing feature of this approach is cut-through routing realized on the bit level abstraction treating ATM protocol data units, called cells, as groups of 424 bits. The arrival events of cells to the system are not instantaneous contrary to commonly used methods of simulation that consider cells as instant messages. The simulation was run for basic multistage interconnection network types with varying source arrival rate and buffer sizes producing a set of graphs of cell delays, throughput, cell loss probability, and queue sizes. The techniques of rearranging and sorting were considered in the simulation. The results indicate that better performance is always achieved by bringing additional stages of elements to the switching system

Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or "promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality. Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun. The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO, Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin