Traditional embedded systems such as secure smart cards and nano-sensor networks have been utilized in various usage models. Nevertheless, emerging secure deeply-embedded systems, e.g., implantable and wearable medical devices, have comparably larger “attack surface”. Specifically, with respect to medical devices, a security breach can be life-threatening (for which adopting traditional solutions might not be practical due to tight constraints of these often-battery-powered systems), and unlike traditional embedded systems, it is not only a matter of financial loss. Unfortunately, although emerging cryptographic engineering research mechanisms for such deeply-embedded systems have started solving this critical, vital problem, university education (at both graduate and undergraduate level) lags comparably. One of the pivotal reasons for such a lag is the multi-disciplinary nature of the emerging security bottlenecks. Based on the aforementioned motivation, in this work, we present an effective research and education integration strategy to overcome this issue in one of the most critical deeply-embedded systems, i.e., medical devices. Moreover, we present the results of two years of implementation of the presented strategy at graduate-level through fault analysis attacks, a variant of side-channel attacks. The results of the presented work show the success of the presented methodology while pinpointing the challenges encountered compared to traditional embedded system security research/teaching integration of medical devices security. We would like to emphasize that our integration approaches are general and scalable to other critical infrastructures as well.
Dr. Mehran Mozaffari Kermani received the B.Sc. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 2005, and the M.E.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, in 2007 and 2011, respectively, under the supervision of Prof. Arash Reyhani-Masoleh. He joined the Advanced Micro Devices as a senior ASIC/layout designer, integrating sophisticated security/cryptographic capabilities into a single accelerated processing unit.
In 2012, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department, Princeton University, New Jersey, as an NSERC post-doctoral research fellow, having the pleasure of working with Prof. Niraj K. Jha. Currently, he is with the Department of Electrical and Microelectronic Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. His current research interests include emerging security/privacy measures for deeply embedded systems, cryptographic hardware systems, fault diagnosis and tolerance in cryptographic hardware, VLSI reliability, and low-power secure and efficient FPGA and ASIC designs.
Currently, he is serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, and the Guest Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing for the special issue of Emerging Embedded and Cyber Physical System Security Challenges and Innovations (2016 and 2017). He was the lead Guest Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing for special issues on security. He is currently serving as the technical committee member for a number of related conferences on embedded systems security and reliability.
He was a recipient of the prestigious Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in 2011 and the Texas Instruments Faculty Award (Douglas Harvey) in 2014.
Reza Azarderakhsh received the BSc degree in electrical and electronic engineering in 2002, the MSc degree in computer engineering from the
Sharif University of Technology in 2005, and the PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Western Ontario in
2011. He was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, as a Limited Duties Instructor, in 2011.
He was a recipient of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in 2012. He has been an
NSERC post-doctoral research fellow with the Center for Applied Cryptographic
Research at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo. Currently, he is a faculty member with the Department of Computer Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. His current research interests include finite field and its application, high-performance computation, elliptic curve cryptography, and pairing based cryptography. He is a member of the IEEE.
Dr. Mehdi Mirakhorli is an Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology with a research background in software architecture design, requirements engineering, and application of data mining in software engineering. Previously, he worked as a software architect on large data-intensive software systems in the banking, meteorological and health care domains. He has served on the Program Committees for several conferences and as Guest Editor for a special edition of IEEE Software on the Twin Peaks of Requirements and Architecture. Dr. Mirakhorli has received two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at the International Conference on Software Engineering.
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