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The Cybersecurity Lecture Series is a free, open-to-the-public lecture from a thought leader who is advancing the field of information security and privacy. Invited speakers include executives and researchers from private companies, government agencies, start-up incubators as well as Georgia Tech faculty and students presenting their research.

Held weekly each Friday at Noon through Apr. 21, lectures are open to all -- students, faculty, industry, government, or simply the curious. Graduate students may register for credit under seminar course CS-8001-INF.

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Featuring Brandon Eames of Sandia National Labs on April 14, 2017

"On Trust Analysis for Microelectronics-Based Systems"

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Microelectronics-based systems pervade modern society, from small mobile devices, to vehicle automation, to large-scale data centers, to military systems.  We depend on these systems not only for logistics and communication, but increasingly for safety and security.  Unfortunately, the pervasiveness of software-based exploits of commercial enterprises exposes the broad question of whether microelectronics-based systems can be trusted to perform their intended function when called upon.

The trust issue is pervasive and has proven elusive to structured science and engineering approaches that aspire to deflect malicious alterations.  In the absence of a system science supporting trust, developers employ opinion-based risk assessments, red team analysis, and system access denial to increase confidence that systems will perform as intended.  Confidence is purchased via certification, waiver and opinion-based analysis rather than quantifiable, engineering-based approaches to evaluate and endow trust.

In this presentation, we discuss the problem of trust and trust analysis, motivated in the context of microelectronics based system development.  We discuss tools and techniques that have been developed for evaluating system security, and show their applicability for evaluating trustworthiness of microelectronics based systems. Specifically, we discuss RIMES (Risk Informed Management of Enterprise Security), a relative risk assessment based technique for evaluating security that has been recently applied to trust evaluation.  We present a game theoretic technique for evaluating the effectiveness of moving target defenses called PLADD (Probabilistic, Learning Attacker, Dynamic Defender), and discuss its applicability as a basis for trust evaluation.

Brandon Eames is a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories.  At Sandia, Dr. Eames engages in pioneering research in the area of trust and trusted development for national security systems.  He has led evaluation and assessment efforts for microelectronics based systems and tools for developing those systems, as well as ongoing research thrusts to develop foundational techniques to both evaluate and design for trust.  He merges expertise with low-level embedded and mobile software development, constraints-driven design space exploration, and hardware architecture to address national security concerns.  Prior to joining Sandia, Dr. Eames was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Utah State University.  He graduated with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University in 2005.