Oct 28: A new generation of students at The University of Alabama in Huntsville will get a hands-on role in research aimed at changing how wireless communications and hardware security work together. Dr. Aubrey Beal, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has won a $600,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to support research that will develop a new approach to secure wireless communication while providing undergraduate and graduate students with direct experience designing and testing microelectronics. UAH is a part of The University of Alabama System.
The award comes through the NSF Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems’ Engineering CAREER program, and the five-year project runs through August 2031. The research will explore novel open-source circuits that generate communication waveforms with naturally embedded, device-specific hardware “fingerprints.” These fingerprints result from physical variations introduced during manufacturing that could provide a way for devices to authenticate themselves, verify manufacturing provenance, support secure communications and generate true random numbers.
“The scheme that we will be building in hardware uses signals from a solvable chaotic oscillator. These signals have been shown to be optimal for simple receivers. Importantly, chaotic systems are sensitive to their parameters,” Beal explains. “This means that small manufacturing changes between devices are expressed as hardware-dependent, unique sequences in their signals. These unique sequences may be extracted from specific hardware as a kind of DNA or fingerprint that ensures that the signals being produced belong to a specific piece of known hardware and not being imitated or “spoofed.”
These advances will seek to create communication systems that use the unique characteristics of both their signals and hardware to make wireless communication more secure and ensure that only trusted devices can connect. At the heart of the project is an effort to bring communication and hardware security together in a single circuit architecture rather than treating them as separate design challenges.
“Our approach is valuable in two ways,” Beal says. “First, we are using systems that produce optimally detected communication waveforms whose patterns are extremely sensitive to underlying manufacturing variations. This gives hardware-dependent fingerprints in the signals we use.
“Second, the types of systems we use have a closed-form analytic solution that allows us to trace the security properties of our efforts back to a first principles theory. The result is co-design approach that simultaneously addresses both communication and security while giving a strong theory for understanding how information will be transmitted and/or secured, as well as quantitative knowledge of the limitations of our implementation.”
This approach turns unavoidable differences between individual pieces of hardware into a built-in security feature, while using mathematical models to understand how reliably that feature works.
The effort will directly involve both undergraduate and graduate researchers, giving UAH students the opportunity to move from classroom concepts to hands-on research and development. Students will simulate, design, build and test mixed-signal microelectronics circuits using equipment in UAH’s electronics laboratory.
“These designs will be migrated to an open-source integrated circuit (IC) design using the Google Skywater 130nm CMOS node,” Beal notes. “These student-developed IC designs will be made open-source and progress throughout our project timeline.”
The experience will give students an opportunity to work across several areas that are increasingly interconnected in the technology workforce, including microelectronics design, wireless communications, hardware security and cybersecurity. The project’s open-source focus also will allow students to contribute designs and resources that can be shared with the broader research and educational communities.
“We will be working with Mountain Gap Elementary as well as the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project to create a series of basic science and math experiments,” the researcher says. “It is our goal to develop these hands-on activities such that they may be performed using inexpensive and common items to see the real-world effects of phenomena like kinetic energy and electric charge.
“These activities will be disseminated to Alabama elementary schools, high schools and prisons through partners throughout the North Alabama region, the Central Black Belt communities and the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project.”
