Dr. Jeyavijayan "JV" Rajendran, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, was awarded the 2022 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award for his research proposal to develop the next generation of tools to bolster hardware security.
When designing software and hardware, vulnerabilities can and do occur. Patching software vulnerabilities found once distributed into the field is much easier for companies who can easily send patches to fix any issues. However, when it comes to hardware, it is much more difficult to patch after the design process has concluded. Rajendran has proposed a new methodology to find these vulnerabilities during the design process so that these faults can be fixed prior to the final distribution stage.
Fuzzing techniques, which are automated testing methods that insert invalid, malformed, or unexpected data into a system to reveal defects and security faults, are shown to be highly effective in detecting software vulnerabilities, but the current proposals aimed at fuzzing hardware suffer from various limitations. These include a limited scope of applicability, error proneness, inadequate evaluations provided and limited prospects for future improvement.
Through this three-year funded project, Rajendran will work to solve all these challenges and bring the state-of-the-art fuzzing-based vulnerability detection techniques to hardware through the novel hardware fuzzer called SteelWool, which does not require any modification to the target processor and utilizes existing hardware simulation tools and techniques, so it is easily integrated with existing hardware design.
“This award gives me the confidence that I can pick my own topic for which I have taken no course for during my Ph.D. or during grad school; and I can contribute a solution to a problem I aim to solve which is exciting,” Rajendran said.
In addition to this award, Rajendran’s research has received many other honors, such as the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Design Automation Outstanding Young Faculty Award, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award and the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s Genesis Award for Multidisciplinary Research.
The ONR young investigator program provides support to academic scientists and engineers who are in their first or second full-time tenure-track academic appointment, have received their doctoral degree in the past seven years and show exceptional promise for executing creative research.