Jia Di, professor of computer science and computer engineering and Twenty-First Century Research Leadership Chair, has received $349,551 from the National Science Foundation to support his research into security issues in computing hardware. Di's proposal was titled, "RESULTS: Reverse Engineering Solutions on Ubiquitous Logic for Trustworthiness and Security" and was funded by the Security and Trustworthy Cyberspace program within the NSF.

Di and researchers at the University of Central Florida will undertake a three-year research project to enhance the security of the circuits used in electronics.

As the supply chain for integrated circuits has grown more global and manufacturing costs have decreased, more modern electronic systems are using commercial, off-the-shelf integrated circuits. This can result in major security and trust concerns as the end user does not have access to the design details for the circuit. This project aims to design an automated trustworthiness and security analysis framework to help end users detect and analyze design flaws and potential security breaches.

As a Transition to Practice project, the research team is also closely collaborating with an industry partner, Radiance Technologies, in developing, integrating, and validating the tool suite so that this work results in a holistic and practice-oriented hardware security tool suite that will protect the integrated circuit supply chain. The results of this project will help the manufacturers of electronic parts and equipment to better assess the trustworthiness of the circuits in their products.

"Dr. Jia Di's NSF grant contributes to the development of a cluster of excellence in the critical area of cybersecurity in the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering," said Frank Liu, department head of computer science and computer engineering.