June 3, 2021
Doctoral graduate Rui Zhang and Associate Professor Cynthia Sturton won second place in Intel’s inaugural Hardware Security Academic Award. As part of the award, Zhang and Sturton received $50,000 to be used for further research and curriculum development.
Intel’s Hardware Security Academic Award program invites academic researchers to submit a recently published paper on outstanding novel research with a meaningful impact on the hardware security ecosystem. Twenty-six submissions from 14 countries were examined for viability, novelty, originality, and relevance, with a focus on demonstrating significant contribution to and impact on the hardware security industry. The awards were presented during the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
The submitted paper, titled “Transys: Leveraging Common Security Properties Across Hardware Designs” (Oakland 2020), presents an algorithm to translate security-critical properties written for one hardware design to make them suitable for use with a second design. Validating the security of a hardware design typically begins with defining the security properties of that design, but this is a difficult and time-consuming task. With Transys, properties already developed for existing designs can be leveraged to ease the burden for a new design. The result is a more thorough security validation process.
For more information, please see the award announcement from Intel.