FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Hacking His Way to the Grand Finals
Microchip Security Innovation Advances NYU-Poly Student Jeyavijayan Rajendran in
Prestigious Competition
NEW YORK, July 20, 2012 – Jeyavijayan Rajendran, a second-year electrical and computer
engineering doctoral candidate at Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly),
advanced to the final round of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Student Research Competition.
Rajendran's work on encryption-based security of integrated circuits puts him and NYU-Poly at
the forefront of microchip security at a time when the semiconductor industry, the military and
government face a veritable flood of “mystery meat” microchips and other hardware that are
typically manufactured abroad. At issue are chips pre-loaded by the manufacturer with malware
that can be operated remotely to steal data, perform espionage and compromise systems.
The U.S. Air Force and other arms of the military are now deeply immersed in untangling this
microchip knot partly because the Pentagon doesn’t control who makes components for complex
machines that can contain thousands of chips, be they radar or next-generation stealth fighters.
Civilian manufacturers face similar supply-chain problems. The semiconductor industry loses an
estimated $4 billion per year due to piracy and malware.
Rajendran’s project, "Securing Integrated Circuits through Logic Encryption," focuses on ways
to expose weaknesses in hardware encryption defenses and then improve upon them. This work
was also presented recently at the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, the leading
electronic design automation conference. He explains that his approach is unique in that it allows
engineers be “white hat” hackers to essentially pick the locks on devices.
"While there were many efforts in concealing hardware designs through logic obfuscation, we
proposed the first attack on these techniques and also came up with defense techniques to thwart
our proposed attack," he says. "We used the principles from a different hardware field which
focuses on screening hardware for defects."
Rajendran, who studies at NYU-Poly's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
(ECE) under Professor Ramesh Karri, says his project borrows from technology used for testing
manufacturer defects in microchips, and applies it to testing the strength of security encryption.
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"I basically took those techniques and applied them to create an attack platform for testing
security. It's a way to 'attack' a system first by teasing out the 'recipe' from the code that was
added to conceal it,” he says. “In the attacker's role, I can see the weak links: I can see which part
is difficult to subvert, and which is easy.”
Also involved in Rajendran's research were Karri; Youngok Pino, an electronics engineer and
program manager at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Information Directorate in
Rome, N.Y.; and Ozgur Sinanoglu, assistant professor of computer engineering at NYU Abu
Dhabi. The research was supported by a grant from the AFRL. Rajendran, Karri and Sinanoglu
conduct their research in collaboration with the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security
and Privacy (CRISSP), which brings together experts in psychology, law, public policy and
business from across NYU. CRISSP builds new approaches to security and privacy that
recognize that technology alone cannot provide the information security and privacy needed in
today’s interconnected world.
Rajendran was one of 20 undergraduate and graduate students from around the world selected
during the first round of the competition sponsored by Microsoft Research. He progressed
through two more rounds to become one of three winners selected in San Francisco. He now
advances to the Grand Finals in June 2013.
Rajendran, who focuses on hardware security and nanoscale architectures, last year also won
third place in IT Security in the Kaspersky American Cup at NYU-Poly; the Myron M.
Rosenthal Award for Best MS Academic Achievement in the ECE Department, NYU-Poly; and
Best Student Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on VLSI (Very Large Scale
Integration) Design, among other honors. He is interning this summer at the Security Center of
Excellence, Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, Ore., working on securing tomorrow's processors.
About Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly Polytechnic University), an affiliated
institute of New York University, is a comprehensive school of engineering, applied sciences,
technology and research, and is rooted in a 158-year tradition of invention, innovation and
entrepreneurship: i2e. The institution, founded in 1854, is the nation’s second-oldest private
engineering school. In addition to its main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in
downtown Brooklyn, it also offers programs at sites throughout the region, around the globe and
remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is an integral part of NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai
and the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in downtown Brooklyn. For more
information, visit www.poly.edu.
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Note to Editors: To download photo: http://research.poly.edu/~resourcespace/?c=873&k=a4d1e8b1a1
Contact:
Kathleen Hamilton
718-260-3792
hamilton@poly.edu