48,663 research outputs found
Creation and detection of hardware trojans using non-invasive off-the-shelf technologies
As a result of the globalisation of the semiconductor design and fabrication processes, integrated circuits are becoming increasingly vulnerable to malicious attacks. The most concerning threats are hardware trojans. A hardware trojan is a malicious inclusion or alteration to the existing design of an integrated circuit, with the possible effects ranging from leakage of sensitive information to the complete destruction of the integrated circuit itself. While the majority of existing detection schemes focus on test-time, they all require expensive methodologies to detect hardware trojans. Off-the-shelf approaches have often been overlooked due to limited hardware resources and detection accuracy. With the advances in technologies and the democratisation of open-source hardware, however, these tools enable the detection of hardware trojans at reduced costs during or after production. In this manuscript, a hardware trojan is created and emulated on a consumer FPGA board. The experiments to detect the trojan in a dormant and active state are made using off-the-shelf technologies taking advantage of different techniques such as Power Analysis Reports, Side Channel Analysis and Thermal Measurements. Furthermore, multiple attempts to detect the trojan are demonstrated and benchmarked. Our simulations result in a state-of-the-art methodology to accurately detect the trojan in both dormant and active states using off-the-shelf hardware
Challenging the evolutionary strategy for synthesis of analogue computational circuits
There are very few reports in the past on applications of Evolutionary Strategy (ES) towards the synthesis of analogue circuits. Moreover, even fewer reports are on the synthesis of computational circuits. Last fact is mainly due to the dif-ficulty in designing of the complex nonlinear functions that these circuits perform. In this paper, the evolving power of the ES is challenged to design four computational circuits: cube root, cubing, square root and squaring functions. The synthesis succeeded due to the usage of oscillating length genotype strategy and the substructure reuse. The approach is characterized by its simplicity and represents one of the first attempts of application of ES towards the synthesis of “QR” circuits. The obtained experimental results significantly exceed the results published before in terms of the circuit quality, economy in components and computing resources utilized, revealing the great potential of the technique pro-posed to design large scale analog circuits
Cross-layer system reliability assessment framework for hardware faults
System reliability estimation during early design phases facilitates informed decisions for the integration of effective protection mechanisms against different classes of hardware faults. When not all system abstraction layers (technology, circuit, microarchitecture, software) are factored in such an estimation model, the delivered reliability reports must be excessively pessimistic and thus lead to unacceptably expensive, over-designed systems. We propose a scalable, cross-layer methodology and supporting suite of tools for accurate but fast estimations of computing systems reliability. The backbone of the methodology is a component-based Bayesian model, which effectively calculates system reliability based on the masking probabilities of individual hardware and software components considering their complex interactions. Our detailed experimental evaluation for different technologies, microarchitectures, and benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed model delivers very accurate reliability estimations (FIT rates) compared to statistically significant but slow fault injection campaigns at the microarchitecture level.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Reductionism and the Universal Calculus
In the seminal essay, "On the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in
the physical sciences," physicist Eugene Wigner poses a fundamental
philosophical question concerning the relationship between a physical system
and our capacity to model its behavior with the symbolic language of
mathematics. In this essay, I examine an ambitious 16th and 17th-century
intellectual agenda from the perspective of Wigner's question, namely, what
historian Paolo Rossi calls "the quest to create a universal language." While
many elite thinkers pursued related ideas, the most inspiring and forceful was
Gottfried Leibniz's effort to create a "universal calculus," a pictorial
language which would transparently represent the entirety of human knowledge,
as well as an associated symbolic calculus with which to model the behavior of
physical systems and derive new truths. I suggest that a deeper understanding
of why the efforts of Leibniz and others failed could shed light on Wigner's
original question. I argue that the notion of reductionism is crucial to
characterizing the failure of Leibniz's agenda, but that a decisive argument
for the why the promises of this effort did not materialize is still lacking.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figur
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