Secure, Trustworthy, and Reliable Systems | ||
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The continued scaling of silicon fabrication technology has led
to significant reliability concerns, which are quickly becoming
a dominant design challenge. Design integrity is threatened
by complexity challenges in the form of immense designs
defying complete verification, and physical challenges such
as silicon aging and soft errors, which impair correct system
operation, not to mention security side-channels that can be
perpetrated by exploiting the hardware design. CSE researchers working
in this space are addressing these key challenges
through synergistic research vectors, which range from near-term
reliability stress reduction techniques to improve the
quality of today’s silicon, to longer-term technologies to detect,
recover, and repair faulty systems. Moreover, the ability to guarantee the functional correctness of digital integrated circuits and, in particular, complex microprocessors, is a key task in the production of secure and trusted systems. Unfortunately, this goal remains today an unfulfilled challenge, as evidenced by the long errata lists available for commercial microprocessors that list latent bugs not found during the design verification process. To address the challenges of verification, the faculty are turning toward the design of introspective systems capable of recognizing and correcting their errant ways. They are exploring and developing “patching” techniques that can repair these escaped bugs directly at the customer site, practically making hardware as malleable as software. In addition, they investigate low-cost techniques to validate computation at runtime, in particular techniques that are provably capable of preventing incorrect results. The faculty working in this domain are also working on hardware security assurance solutions to protect computer systems against hardware and software attacks by means of hardware protection techniques. These efforts are supported and complemented by strong focus on functional verification methodologies. The overarching goal is to provide highly effective and low-cost solutions to ensure security, correctness and reliability in future designs, thereby extending the lifetime of silicon fabrication technologies. From a software perspective, research at Michigan is focused both on identifying security and privacy vulnerabilities in existing systems and on developing solutions to address these threats. The need for systems that are provably secure and private by design is greater than ever before with the increasing use of online services and adoption of wearable healthcare devices/implants as well as the incentives for corporations and nation state attackers to compromise user privacy and security of electronic voting. Projects on these topics span embedded systems, mobile devices and apps, cyber-physical systems, social networks, and the web. Related LinksSecurity and Privacy Research GroupSystems Lab Theory of Computation Lab |
CSE FacultyAustin, ToddBertacco, Valeria Chen, Peter M. Cheraghchi, Mahdi Das, Reetuparna Ensafi, Roya Grubbs, Paul Halderman, J. Alex Huang, Ryan Kapritsos, Manos Kasikci, Baris Manerkar, Yatin Mao, Zhuoqing Morley Mudge, Trevor Narayanasamy, Satish Noble, Brian Peikert, Christopher Prakash, Atul Sakallah, Karem A. Weimer, Westley ECE FacultyAustin, ToddMudge, Trevor Ozay, Necmiye Sakallah, Karem A. |