Synopsys ZeBu Emulation Unit for Advanced Emulation-based SoC Security Verification (ZEUS)
Abstract
Funds are sought by UF Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) Research to acquire a Synopsys ZeBu SoC emulation Framework that will support education and research on hardware security and trust assessment at the microscale. The globalization of the electronics industry and outsourcing of IC fabrication to offshore foundries, as well as ever-increasing size, complexity, and heterogenicity of the modern ICs-SoCs have resulted in a longer supply chain and risen critical challenges for the Department of Defense (DoD) including (i) ease of cloning, reverse engineering, IP piracy, and IC overproduction (ii) development of advanced physical-logical attacks (iii) breaches of confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Such problems have widespread implications for critical US military, financial, power, space, and transportation systems. FICS Research was established to be the nation’s premier multidisciplinary research institute in the advancement of cybersecurity. FICS Research faculty includes leading researchers in the area of hardware security with projects funded by DoD agencies. The sought-after ZeBu Server-3 unit is an emulation framework with many capabilities enabling us for emulation-based design verification at largescale, i.e., SoC and system-level, which makes it the perfect tool for educational purposes. The integration of the ZeBu Server-3 framework into FICS Research, which supports 20 faculty and over 110 PhD students, will establish a novel workflow for advanced system-level and SoC-level security verification. Ongoing research projects at UF that will greatly benefit from the ZeBu to educate the next generation of the workforce for DoD on physical assurance topics including but not limited to emulation-based detection of SoC security vulnerabilities using self-refinement techniques like fuzz testing, penetration testing, and AI approaches, power side-channel leakage assessment with system-level test pattern generation, property checking-based SoC security verification, and accelerated system-level and SoC-level information flow tracking. The FICS Research team will develop virtual labs to promote interest from undergraduates and high school students. FICS Research shall also work closely for workforce development and distance education related to the ZeBu emulation for SoC verification through on-site training events and online tutorials. In addition, Florida Applied Research and Engineering (FLARE) at UF, which is a classified contractor, will be working closely with FICS Research to make the facilities and the sought-after system available for classified research
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 06, 2024
- Source ID
- FA95502310415
Entities
People
- Farimah Farahmandi
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- United States Air Force
- University of Florida