ECE/ISR Ph.D. Students Win Hardware Demo Competitions in HOST Symposium

ECE/ISR Ph.D. students Yiting (Nelly) Wang and Zelin Lu won 2nd place award in the hardware demo competition at IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST’2024, May 6-9 in McLean, Virginia). The awarded demo is a result of their ongoing research project “Belief Propagation Attack against NTT implementation on FPGA”, advised by Prof. Gang Qu (ECE/ISR) and ECE alumni Prof. Md Tanvir Arafin (George Mason University).

Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) is a fundamental component of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and lattice based post quantum cryptography (PQC) for reducing the complexity of multiplication in the polynomial rings. Wang and Lu's research proposed a novel attack methodology that can effectively retrieve the input of NTT implemented on FPGA. This work is crucial as FHE and PQC are widely considered as cornerstones for future secure computing, the former allows computations on encrypted data without decryption and the latter are designed against attacks from the powerful quantum computers. This research highlights critical security vulnerabilities that potentially exist in the FPGA implementations of FHE and PQC.

HOST Symposium is a leading forum for the rapidly growing hardware-based security research and development, and a premier event focusing on the critical role of hardware in cybersecurity. This year’s HOST Hardware Demo Competition has accepted 25 demos from 15 universities worldwide.

Published June 5, 2024