Essential News

Award Spotlight

Dr. Farimah Farahmandi, FICS Associate Director, and Dr. Mark Tehranipoor have recently been awarded a $330,000 SRC (Semiconductor Research Corporation) grant for their groundbreaking project, “PASS: Physically-aware Secure Software Execution.” 

As modern software increasingly runs on vulnerable circuits found in system-on-chips (SoCs), processors, IoT devices, and smartphones, the risks of both cyber and hardware attacks are growing. While protections against cyberattacks are integrated into the software development, standardization, and compilation cycles, physical attacks—such as fault injection and side-channel attacks—target hardware directly, bypassing higher-level defenses. These attacks compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of modern chips. 

The “PASS” project proposes a novel, cost-effective, and scalable approach to addressing these physical threats at the software compilation stage. By modeling physical attacks based on real hardware characteristics, the project enables secure software compilations that incorporate physically-aware hardening techniques, providing a more robust defense against hardware-based vulnerabilities. 

Research Highlight

Cellular networks represent critical communications infrastructure, vital for both day-to-day communication and for emergency services. A recent study conducted by Ph.D. students Nathaniel Bennet and Weidong Zhu, under the guidance of FICS Director Dr. Kevin Butler and Dr. Patrick Traynor, identified 119 vulnerabilities in LTE and 5G cellular core infrastructure. These vulnerabilities impact both open-source and proprietary implementations and could lead to large-scale service disruption if exploited. This work, published at the 2024 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), highlights the urgent need for security assessments of the cellular core.

For more details on the research, click here.  

Student Spotlight