Houman Homayoun, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, works with PhD student Katayoun Neshatpour to develop solutions that will prevent malware from being installed in computer chips. Photo by Evan Cantwell
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Fighting a New Trojan War National security is at risk because of a war on hardware, according to Mason Engineering researcher Houman Homayoun. An associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Homayoun says that many cybersecurity attacks today are targeting hardware, and these invasions are dangerous and diffcult to defend. Experts have been using different strategies to protect software from hackers for more than 20 years. “Now the hacking technology is so advanced that instead of just making software attacks on the system, attackers change the hardware itself,” Homayoun says. “Hardware security is emerging as a new feld that is needed to address the enormous challenges government and industry are facing to protect integrated circuits used in areas such as the Internet of Things and cloud infrastructures.” To improve hardware security, Homayoun has received more than $3 million in funding from multiple government research programs.
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Part of the reason for the increase in hardware security problems is that many semiconductor chips are no longer manufactured in the United States but are made overseas, including in Europe and Asia, he says. Some untrustworthy manufacturers are inserting hardware Trojans, a type of malware, into integrated circuits during fabrication, and some are copying and cloning sensitive chips. “They can steal the technology completely because they know every detail of the design to fabricate it, which means they don’t have to spend time and money designing their own defense technology,” he says. This is a problem for national security because many chips are used in important military equipment or in safety-critical systems such as emerging smart cars. The U.S. government is combating these problems in several ways, including identifying trustworthy manufacturers.
