Event

This seminar covers several topics, which are briefly presented here. In this seminar, the students discuss the latest research findings (publications) on the topics below. The findings are summarized in a seminar paper and presented to other participants in the seminar. Your own suggestions for topics are welcome, but not required. The seminar can be completed in German or English.

Dependability for Reconfigurable Architectures

Reliability has become a major concern in the recent nano era. Reliability (the ability of the system to provide the specified services) and security (the ability of the system to protect itself against intentional or accidental intrusion) are the two critical properties of reliable systems. Among the other reliability threats posed by the physical limitations of CMOS technology, radiation-induced soft errors or transient errors are the greatest challenge to be overcome. During this seminar we will examine the state of the art for energy efficient soft error reliability and examine various research solutions, to improve soft error elasticity in an energy efficient way, taking advantage of tradeoffs between performance, performance and reliability. During this seminar, students will also be able to understand hardware security in reconfigurable architectures, learn the ways of inserting Trojans into an FPGA design / IP, and explore various techniques for detecting such stealthy Trojans, such as Bitstream reverse engineering using open source tool flow.

Thermal and Power Aware Embedded Systems

Power densities are continuously increasing along with technology scaling and the integration of more transistors into smaller areas, potentially resulting in thermal emergencies on the chip. To mitigate such emergencies, power and thermal management techniques are employed. The state-of-the-art power and thermal management techniques can be classified into several categories, such as reactive and proactive techniques, centralized and distributed ones. Recently, machine learning algorithms are employed in power and thermal management techniques to make them more proactive and adaptive. Those various categories of the state-of-the-art techniques need to be reviewed in this seminar to demonstrate the advantage and disadvantage of each of them.

Security of Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

Various types of (re) configurable systems have emerged in recent years. The spectrum ranges from one-time configurable systems that are programmed at the design time for product-specific requirements, to reconfigurable systems that can also be adapted after commissioning, to dynamically reconfigurable systems whose configuration can be changed at runtime and their ability to dynamic reconfiguration is an important part of their system functionality.
This seminar focuses on the runtime reconfigurable systems, their security aspects and methods. It investigates the current state of research for securing the runtime reconfigurable systems, as well as the feasibility of using the security measures from general processing architectures to runtime reconfigurable systems.

Security in Resource Management

Efficient resource management in many-core systems (ie, systems with more than 100 cores, not only a dozen) has become a research challenge in the last years. As complexity and the demand for scalability increase, this new paradigm should also consider new security features to avoid or mitigate the effects of malicious applications both on critical information and the system as a whole.

In this seminar, we will focus on the state-of-the-art of security attacks such as Side Channel Attacks (SCA), Covert channel attacks, as well as other similar resource-based attacks and their effects on other critical applications running on many-core systems. During this seminar, student will dive into the security aspects of resource management, while investigating answers to the following research questions:

• How do these attacks work?
• Which are the associated vulnerabilities? What resources are vulnerable?
• What's their impact on critical information or other resources?
• What are the current countermeasures for the attacks?