PIPages
Labs

Farimah Farahmandi

University of Florida, FL·Engineering·Early-career

Computer chips run banking systems, hospitals, defense equipment and businesses. As chips grow more complex, with many functional blocks talking to each other and to the internet, they also gain more security weaknesses.

Fields

Engineering

Computer Science

Topics

hardware security

system-on-chip

SoC

Grants
1 known grant, through Feb 2029

What they work on

  1. Build a comprehensive database of security properties and rules for system-on-chip (SoC) designs, using AI to help collect and organize them for use in pre-fabrication security checks.
  2. Use AI to automatically generate functional security properties, formal statements of how a chip design must behave securely, and to assist in generating and verifying security rules.
  3. Develop AI-driven test generation for chip security verification and validation, aiming for high coverage and much shorter verification time than manual approaches.
  4. Make the SAIF framework scale to more complex circuits and adapt to new attack surfaces as chips gain more interacting components and internet connections.

More about the research

A flaw found after a chip is manufactured can leak sensitive data or damage critical infrastructure, and it is hard to fix. Checking a chip's security before it is built is therefore essential, but current checks are slow and depend heavily on human experts.

Why it matters

Hardware security flaws in chips used in finance, healthcare, defense and business can leak private information or damage critical infrastructure, and they are costly to fix once a chip is made. Automated, AI-assisted security checking before fabrication could help chip designers find vulnerabilities earlier and faster, and handle larger designs and new attack methods.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

CAREER: SAIF: Security Assurance through AI and Formal Approaches for System-on-Chips

NSF · Mar 2024 – Feb 2029

Closest labs

Kanad Basu

University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Engineering

Develop a formal foundation for information flow analysis in system-on-chip designs that accounts for asynchronous events, such as interrupts, and for hardware-firmware interaction, which cause hard-to-detect security violations.

Kanad Basu

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY·Engineering·Early-career

Develop an automated quantum circuit construction toolset supporting end-to-end design, including quantum state preparation and function synthesis from the gates available on modern quantum processors.

Weidong Cao

George Washington University, DC·Engineering

Build AnalogEDA-Hub, an open-source platform with multi-modal datasets, learning-based tools and standard design environments, so researchers can benchmark AI methods for analog circuit design in a reproducible way.

The school

University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Florida

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