{"id":31183,"date":"2022-05-17T11:44:02","date_gmt":"2022-05-17T15:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/newengineer\/?p=31183"},"modified":"2025-06-11T12:42:22","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T17:42:22","slug":"confounding-pirates-and-trojan-horses-ai-gatekeepers-at-uf-provide-innovative-tool-for-industries-looking-to-shut-down-bad-actors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/ece\/confounding-pirates-and-trojan-horses-ai-gatekeepers-at-uf-provide-innovative-tool-for-industries-looking-to-shut-down-bad-actors\/","title":{"rendered":"Confounding Pirates and Trojan Horses: AI Gatekeepers at UF Provide Innovative Tool for Industries Looking to Shut Down Bad Actors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"From<\/a>
From left: Domenic Forte, Ph.D., Steven A. Yatauro Fellow and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Damon Woodard, Ph.D., director of the Florida Institute for National Security and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Ronald Wilson, Ph.D., post-doctoral researcher in Electrical and Computer Engineering<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s been an issue with integrated circuits (IC) for a long time. While roughly 80 percent of the globe\u2019s intellectual property (IP) is developed in the U.S, more than 80 percent of the chip fabrication is done in Asia, where compromised foundries can insert malware or may heist the embedded IP. End users in inhospitable nation-states can also reverse-engineer chips. And with supply chains languishing due to the pandemic, counterfeiters are rapidly capitalizing on the shortage of microchips by flooding the market with corrupted knockoffs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe financial cost of this problem is immense,\u201d said Damon Woodard, Ph.D., director of the Florida Institute for National Security and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida (UF). \u201cIntellectual property infringement accounts for multiple billion dollars each year. But more importantly, this is a national security threat. The prospect of a Trojan horse finding its way into some military equipment requires a solution that can verify chip security without the shadow of a doubt that what you\u2019re expecting is what you\u2019re getting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Woodard is leading a $1.2 million, three-year NSF research project to use artificial intelligence for the purpose of hardware security by developing an automated toolkit that will detect intellectual property and verify that the IC designs are exactly what they are supposed to be and not a piracy or sabotage. \u201cIn essence, we get the chip, take it apart, and let AI scan it to map the design, then we use the data gathered by the AI to verify whether what is supposed to be there is actually there,\u201d Dr. Woodard explains.<\/p>\n

A powerful in-house asset<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The IC images are provided by UF\u2019s FEI Helios Nanolab 600 dual-beam focused-ion beam\/scanning electron microscope (FIB\/SEM), which offers microchip scans at a resolution of less than one nanometer. \u201cToday\u2019s most advanced chips have features around three nanometers,\u201d said Domenic Forte, Ph.D., Steven A. Yatauro Fellow and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who serves as director of the Florida Institute for CyberSecurity (FICS) Research\u2019s SeCurity and AssuraNce (SCAN)\u00a0 Lab. \u201cTo put that in perspective, a human hair is about 60,000 nanometers wide.\u201d A co-PI of the project who focuses on the hardware component, Dr. Forte uses ion beams from the FIB\/SEM to gradually oblate the layers of the chip to reveal the next feature below, as it produces scans simultaneously. Then an aggregation of all the images is knitted together, then reverse engineered, to form a replication of the IC guided by AI. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Integrated circuit camouflaging techniques protect intellectual property from reverse engineering by disrupting the ability of the attacker to identify logic gates from the images obtained after delayering and imaging.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThink of it as teleportation \u2014 you destroy it in one place and completely recreate it in another,\u201d said Ronald Wilson, Ph.D., a UF post-doctoral researcher in Electrical and Computer Engineering whose work in reverse engineering and building the algorithms fuel the project\u2019s IC security models. \u201cThe traditional approach takes a very long time because you\u2019re talking about a circuit design with billions of electronic gates and hundreds of thousands of images. And, because it involves humans, it\u2019s error prone. Automation through AI is much less likely to make those mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The game-changing effect of the <\/strong>HiPerGator<\/strong><\/a><\/h2>\n

An important facet of the project is developing \u2018privacy-preserving transformations,\u2019 replications of the chip data where the instructive elements are present to train the algorithms while obscuring the details of the IP holder\u2019s proprietary design. Companies and defense contractors are not only strict about protecting their property but are bound by strict nondisclosure agreements. \u201cIndustry doesn\u2019t want to release all the design information that could make the IP creator vulnerable to piracy,\u201d Dr. Wilson said. Using UF\u2019s data-crunching HiPerGator, his team develops algorithms to disguise the design, giving IP holders a facsimile of the underlying data that helps them improve their IC models without revealing the essential kernel of their sweat equity.<\/p>\n

\u201cHiPerGator is the number one thing we have at UF that allows us to pull this off by doing these complex transformations,\u201d Dr. Woodard said. \u201cThese models demand highly sophisticated work which requires significant training. That time is reduced by at least half using the supercomputer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Renowned for his innovations in facial recognition and deconstructing deep fakes\u2014 digitally altered images or videos \u2014 Dr. Woodard uses a similar skillset to expand his repertoire into IC security.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechniques I\u2019ve learned for facial recognition are directly applicable here,\u201d he said. \u201cIn each application, we are working with images which possess less than ideal characteristics. That\u2019s the computer vision aspect \u2014 how computers gain high-level learning from vast analysis of images \u2014 and it applies here too. In our proposal we intend to generate synthetic data \u2014 virtual data that was not captured \u2014 to facilitate data-driven approaches to reverse engineering, like we did with deep fakes. Here, we\u2019re applying some of the techniques that we used with deep fakes, of generating fake face images, doing the same thing to generate fake IC\/SEM (scanning electron microscope) images. We have a very large and realistic data set to teach the AI what to look for in the design.\u201d<\/p>\n

The proposal is a \u2018transfer-to-practice\u2019 (TTP) project, one that is farther along in its research progression and fungible by virtue of its demand in the marketplace, having been courted by Battelle, a nonprofit microelectronics interest, Texplained, a French company that specializes in IC reverse engineering, trust\/assurance of electronics and evaluation of intellectual property, and TechInsights, the recognized world leader in microelectronics reverse engineering and IP services.<\/p>\n

Building a diverse cybersecurity talent pipeline<\/strong><\/h2>\n

As an outreach component of the NSF proposal, Dr. Woodard and his team will recruit four undergraduate students each year from Prairie View A&M\u2019s Secure Center of Excellence<\/a>, giving them invaluable cybersecurity research experience during the summer session. Preliminary distance learning modules consisting of video lectures and exercises that are based on AI, computer vision, deep learning and hardware security, along with access to research team meetings will be offered to Prairies View students. Through UF\u2019s partnership with the Inclusive Engineering Consortium (IEC) \u2014 a collective of 15 HBCUs, three Hispanic-serving institutions and two tribal colleges \u2014 Prairie View A&M students will have reciprocal use of HiPerGator at their Houston campus. Dr. Woodard hopes to inspire these students to enroll in graduate studies at UF eventually. \u201cAnything we can do here, they can do there,\u201d he said. \u201cOnce they get a taste of this experience, we\u2019d like to see them go to the next level by joining our research community in this crucial work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Damon Woodard, Ph.D., director of the Florida Institute for National Security and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading a $1.2M research effort to use artificial intelligence for the purpose of hardware security.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2592,"featured_media":31217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"single-templates\/single-sidebar-none.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"featured_post":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[73,15,35,65,57],"tags":[91,93,153,155,171,323],"class_list":["post-31183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-university","category-ece","category-featured","category-security","category-stories","tag-ai-thought-leadership","tag-aiatuf","tag-cybersecurity","tag-damon-woodard","tag-domenic-forte","tag-ronald-wilson"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nConfounding Pirates and Trojan Horses: AI Gatekeepers at UF Provide Innovative Tool for Industries Looking to Shut Down Bad Actors - 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