Hardware Security
Exploring Architectural Vulnerability of Deep Learning Architectures against Hardware Intrinsic (Lead- Hasan)
Deep learning architectures (DLA) have shown impressive performance in 
computer vision, natural language processing, autonomous vehicles, smart manufacturing,
etc. Many DLA make use of cloud computing to achieve classification due to the high
computation and memory requirements. Privacy and latency concerns resulting from cloud
computing has inspired the deployment of DLA on embedded hardware accelerators. To
achieve short time-to-market and have access to global experts, state-of-the-art
techniques of DLA deployment on hardware accelerators are outsourced and often to
untrusted 3rd parties. This raises security concerns as hardware intrinsic attacks
can be inserted into such hardware accelerators for DLA. Existing hardware intrinsic
attacks highlighted in literature have few limitations, such as they require full
knowledge of DLA and don’t offer any qualitative means to make sure the triggering
will occur. This research investigates hardware intrinsic attacks that are both stealthier
and practical in terms of implementation, leveraging statistical properties of layer-by-layer
output of DLA. This research also focuses on potential threat models when DLA is distributed
in an Edge Intelligence environment for AIoT applications. Preliminary results show
that such attacks can be very stealthy and requires minimal resources. Moreover, this
research will propose defense mechanism against such vulnerabilities by employing
security checkpoints via a trusted network node acting as a defender.