Sayak Ray, Pre-Silicon Hardware Security Analysis through Information Flow Tracking - Current Industry Applications and Research Questions

Information Flow Tracking (IFT) is a useful tool to reason about security of a system. It can be applied at different levels of abstraction - starting from operating system all the way to gate-level circuits through various representations of software and hardware. In this talk, we will focus on IFT at the register transfer level (RTL) representation of hardware and discuss how IFT can be applied to find various types of RTL security vulnerabilities. We will discuss an inductive formulation of the problem based on leakage alert and propagation alert that offers a scalable solution and micro-architecture-level design insights compared to more traditional formulations. We will end the talk by outlining some of the research challenges that we need to address to push the boundary further. About the speaker: Dr. Sayak Ray is a Security Researcher at Intel Corporation. His area of research includes tools and automation for security validation, security challenges in FPGA, heterogeneous computing and data center networking. Dr. Ray regularly publishes at design automation conferences and journals. He has served on technical program committees of various conferences such as DAC and ICCAD. Before joining Intel in 2016, he was a Post-doctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Dr. Ray obtained his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2013.