Deepankar Medhi
$297,448
Amin Rezaei
Hossein Sayadi
Mehrdad Aliasgari
California State University-Long Beach Foundation
California
Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/><br/>Wearable and portable sensors are finding their way into everyday life, not only as tracking devices but as diagnostic and treatment devices. Wearable wireless devices require efficient secure communication solutions that meet the resource-limited requirements of such devices. To facilitate secure communications for low-power, implantable, portable, or wearable sensors, the encryption process must be integrated directly with the sensor’s underlying hardware. Chaotic circuits can be used to secure communication of resource-limited devices. Chaotic systems are highly complex, unpredictable, and sensitive to their initial condition. However, they can be used to generate predictable responses if certain requirements are met. Chaos can be utilized to hide data under noise, thus providing data confidentiality if used in wireless communication. On the other hand, applications of chaos in secure wireless communication have been limited to laboratory research. Lack of solutions that maintain both ends of communication (transmitter and receiver) synchronized in real-world applications has limited the use of chaotic communication to research laboratories.<br/><br/>To eliminate these issues and provide an efficient, reliable, and secure on-chip chaotic ciphering transmitter and receiver, this research aims to accomplish the following objectives. Phase 1: Delivering a chaotic low-power transmitter and receiver capable of real-time ciphering of sensory signals. Phase 2: Securing the underlying hardware of chaotic communication against piracy and duplication by adopting a provably secure logic locking framework specifically designed for such systems. Phase 3: Developing efficient smart and machine learning algorithms to provide a dynamic matching of the transmitted and received signal. Phase 4: IC prototyping and implementing the design in the physical form to ensure the functionality of the design. This research brings researchers from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science in California State University Long Beach to provide a logic locked transmitter and receiver that can code and decode the signal using chaos in an efficient and reliable manner.<br/><br/>The financial burden of healthcare has been preventing many, most among minorities and underrepresented groups from monitoring their medical condition and seeking treatment. Wearable technology has seen an unprecedented increase in adoption in the last decade and can reduce the cost of healthcare. It can provide accessible care if security is implemented on devices at the design. If such devices are designed with efficient security, the public confidence, and subsequently their adoption, will increase. California State University, Long Beach is a minority serving institute ranked number four for diversity among United States colleges. By engaging diverse students in designing, implementing, and testing secure solutions for wearable health devices, this project aims to expand participation in computing and communication research. Furthermore, secure wearable devices can enhance trust and adoption of such health-monitoring devices and increase access to affordable healthcare and improve health equity.<br/><br/>The general progress of the projects, results, and datasets will be shared publicly through the website and Git repository. The obtained results from this research will be disseminated in the form of publications, technical presentations, design reports, educational materials, dataset, and source code, and will be hosted publicly for the length of this project and beyond, on the investigator's website and Git repository.<br/>The project Git repository: https://github.com/ahedaya/csulb_nsf_cise_msi<br/>The project Website: https://avahedayatipour.com/research/hardwaresecurity<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.