Hardware and information security primitives based on two-dimensional materials and device phenomena
Open Access
- Author:
- Wali, Akshay
- Graduate Program:
- Electrical Engineering
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 03, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Mauricio Terrones, Outside Unit & Field Member
Rongming Chu, Major Field Member
Swaroop Ghosh, Co-Chair of Committee
Abhronil Sengupta, Major Field Member
Saptarshi Das, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Madhavan Swaminathan, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Hardware Security
2D materials. - Abstract:
- The explosive growth of computing platforms such as the Internet of Things (IoT) which is an amalgamation of highly complex, heterogeneous and interconnected hardware components has bridged the gap between the physical and the digital world. However, integrating such large number of devices involving humungous amounts of data has raised new system security concerns. Additionally, with an increasing globalization of semiconductor supply chain ecosystem ranging from gathering raw materials to manufacturing and testing, these electronic devices have become more vulnerable to external threats such as reverse engineering (RE), trojan insertion and side channel attacks due to the involvement of untrustworthy parties. Therefore, hardware security is becoming increasingly important for nearly all IoT platforms. While silicon-based complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) hardware security solutions have been demonstrated in the past, there is still room for improvement particularly in terms of area overheads and energy consumption. Therefore, interest in exploring out-of-the-box security solutions involving novel materials and device properties has grown tremendously. In recent years, two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have been intensely explored to mitigate these security challenges. This thesis demonstrates and discusses several innovative and area efficient hardware security primitives developed using unique properties of 2D-materials and their associated device phenomena. The thesis particularly focuses on implementing security primitives such as hardware camouflaging and true random number generators (TRNGs). In addition, the thesis provides an invaluable insight into the vulnerabilities of in-memory computing technology which can be manipulated to deliberate insert hardware trojan with a chip resulting in its severe malfunction. Finally, moving away from the hardware demonstrations, a new type of physically unclonable function (PUF) which exploits the spatiotemporal randomness found within the population of biological specimens such as T-cells is also presented. In the end, we address the constraints of this thesis at the current stage while presenting their mitigation strategies and offering futuristic perspective for enabling better and efficient hardware security primitives.