Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede

Photo of Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede

Short Biography

Ingrid Verbauwhede is a professor at the COSIC (Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography) Research Group of the Electrical Engineering Department, KU Leuven, where she leads the embedded systems team. She is a pioneer in the field of secure embedded circuits and systems, with several awards recognizing her contributions to the field. Verbauwhede’s main research interests are system and architecture design, embedded systems, ASIC and FPGA design and design methodologies for real-time, low power embedded systems and more specifically embedded security systems. Her projects investigate fast, low power encryption platforms, which can also be easily reprogrammed and reconfigured, and how even the lightest devices can be made resistant against security hacks. She advocates security as another design dimension for lightweight devices, e.g., things in IoT (Internet of Things) should be designed and optimized for security.

Prof. Verbauwhede is a fellow of IEEE and a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium for Sciences and Arts. In 2016 she received an advanced ERC grant and in 2017 a IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for pioneering contributions to design methodologies for tamper-resistant and secure electronic systems.

Talk Title: Secure Hardware Design: Starting from the Roots of Trust

What is “hardware” security? Is there a design method for secure hardware design? To answer this question, different communities have different expectations of trusted (expecting trustworthy) hardware components upon which they start to build a secure system. The network designer relies on the security of the router box. The circuit designer worries about fault and side-channel attacks. The software developer expects a compute platform free from micro-architectural side channel leakage. At the same time, electronics shrink: sensor nodes, IOT devices, smart devices are becoming more and more available. Adding security and cryptography to these often very resource constraint devices is a challenge. This presentation aims at bringing some order in the chaos of expectations by introducing design abstraction layers and roots of trust. If time permits, we will show some recent results of EM fault injection attacks.

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