Dr. Domenic Forte has received an NSF CAREER Award for “Transformative Approaches for Hardware Obfuscation Protection, Attacks, and Assessment.”

The NSF CAREER program fosters the career development of outstanding junior faculty, combining the support of research and education of the highest quality and in the broadest sense.

Dr. Forte’s five-year, $400K grant will support his research aimed at protecting integrated circuits (ICs) from threats to national security and economic growth, such as piracy, counterfeiting, and tampering. Specifically, hardware ‘obfuscation’ methods will be investigated to obscure circuit designs, preventing them from reverse engineering and unauthorized use. Education and outreach activities associated with this project include:

• creating the first publicly available benchmarks
• conducting online competitions
• generating new course materials and projects
• a book