Assistant Professor Hassan Salmani Publishes Book on Cybersecurity Issues

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Assistant Professor Hassan Salmani’s Trusted Digital Circuits: Hardware Trojan Vulnerabilities, Prevention and Detection was recently released by the global publishing company Springer.

Dr. Salmani astonishingly completed the book in fourteen months, following ten years of rigorous research and study. His motivation: Untrusted international suppliers of electronic devices creating a high demand in cybersecurity developments.

Dr. Salmani finds the book topic to be quite challenging and demanding; his aim was to "study the challenges, review existing techniques and highlight shortcomings."

From the preface:

The complexity of modern designs, the significant cost of research and development, and the shrinking time-to-market window heavily enforce the horizontal integrated circuit design flow. Many entities across the globe might be involved in the flow and none are necessarily trusted. A malicious party can launch a hardware Trojan attack through manipulating a circuit to undermine its characteristics under rare circumstances at different stages of the flow before and after circuit manufacturing. Detection of hardware Trojans using existing pre-silicon and post-silicon verification techniques is a very challenging task because of the complexity of modern designs, their variety of application, and limited time for verification.

This book is entirely dedicated to study hardware Trojans across the integrated circuit design flow. Unprecedentedly, the book carefully studies integrated circuits at register-transfer level, gate level, and layout level against hardware Trojans. Vulnerabilities of each level to hardware Trojan insertion are discussed, and existing solutions for preventing and detecting hardware Trojans are studied. The book extends its study to hardware Trojan detection after integrated circuit manufacturing and deliberates current testing techniques for hardware Trojan detection. Vulnerabilities of mixed-signal circuits do not remain hidden, and the book studies possible hardware Trojan design in mixed-signal circuits and evaluates existing techniques for hardware Trojan prevention and detection in mixed-signal circuits.

The book offers a comprehensive and detailed analysis of hardware Trojans before and after integrated circuit manufacturing. This book provides design practitioners with guidance on protecting their designs against hardware Trojans and reveals research shortcomings that require attention to address hardware Trojans.