Ph.D. candidates Zachary Ellis and Anupam Golder won this year’s Microelectronics Security Award (IP Security Track) at the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST).

Ellis and Golder are advised by Arijit Raychowdhury, professor and Steve W. Chaddick School Chair, in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. They participated in the competition alongside University of Kansas students Tanvir Hossain and Mahmudul Hasan and their Ph.D. advisor, Assistant Professor Tamzidul Hoque.

The team’s primary objective in the Microelectronics Security Competition was to showcase two distinct attack methods on a provided design from the organizers, followed by the implementation of countermeasures against these attacks. Their submission successfully demonstrated both attacks on the original design and incorporated three different countermeasures. Specifically, they implemented two countermeasures to combat the differential power analysis (DPA) attack and one countermeasure to address the differential fault analysis (DFA) attack.

The team demonstrated their design in-person at HOST ’23 which was held May 1-4 in San Jose, California. HOST is the premier symposium that facilitates the rapid growth of hardware-based security research and development. Since 2008, it has served as the globally recognized event for researchers and practitioners to advance knowledge and technologies related to hardware security and assurance.