Secure and Trusted Microelectronics: Designing Secure Computing Systems from Untrusted Components 

The current trend in system-on-chip (SoC) design is system-level integration of heterogeneous technologies consisting of a large number of processing elements such as programmable RISC cores, memories, DSPs, and accelerator function units/ASIC. These processing elements may come from different providers, and application executable code may have varying levels of trust. Some of the pressing, security-related, architecture design questions are: (1) how to implement multi-level user-defined security; (2) how to optimally and securely share resources and data among processing elements; (3) how to use reconfiguration for the purpose of obfuscation to attackers. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the Secure, Trusted, and Assured Microelectronics (STAM) Center and our research efforts in investigating new semiconductor substrates, synthesis, and fabrication techniques coupled with the design and prototype of application-aware secure processors with field tests readiness in mind. Next, I will present a secure multicore architecture that integrates multiple processing elements (which may include secure and non-secure cores) into the same chip design, while (i) maintaining individual security, (ii) preventing data leakage and corruption, and (iii) enforcing secure resource sharing among mutually distrusting processing elements or applications.

Michel A. Kinsy is the director of the ASU Secure, Trusted, and Assured Microelectronics (STAM) Center. He is an Associate Professor in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Dr. Kinsy focuses his research on secure computer architecture, hardware-level security, and efficient hardware design and implementation of post-quantum cryptography systems. Before joining the ASU faculty, Dr. Kinsy was an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU) where he also served as the Associate Director of the Texas A&M Cybersecurity Center (TAMC2). He also held faculty positions at Boston University and University of Oregon. From 2013 to 2014, he was a fully-cleared Member of the Technical Staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Dr. Kinsy is an MIT Presidential Fellow and an Inaugural Skip Ellis Career Award recipient. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2013 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).