Building NextG Resilient Wireless Systems from Untrusted Hardware

Project Overview

The design, manufacturing, and deployment of next generation (NextG) cellular networks (5G and beyond) is increasingly relying on specialized, high-performance baseband and radio frequency (RF) hardware components, often supplied by third parties across the globe. The use of these components can accelerate innovation, improve network performance, and reduce the cost of network operation. Yet, the reliance of critical of hardware components sourced from diverse man- ufacturers introduces formidable security vulnerabilities into critical network infrastructure. The broad goal of this project is to develop methods to build resilient and secure NextG wireless systems from these potentially unsecure hardware components. This project focuses on a particularly important class of attacks called hardware Trojans, where hardware components supplied by a third party are maliciously altered to launch an attack from within a network node, such as a cellular base stations. Once triggered, these attacks can degrade or disable service, transmit signals to disrupt other nodes, or snoop or leak sensitive data. The project combines theory in hardware security and communications theory to detect and mitigate these attacks.

Research Thrusts

The work is developed in four closely related thrusts.

• Thrust 1 develops computationally efficient methods to detect the presence of hardware Trojans in both the baseband and RF.
• Thrust 2 provides rigorous bounds to estimate the capacity of undetected hardware attacks and enables a critical optimization of the power and computation on hardware verification and potential throughput degradation.
• Thrust 3 extends these methods to network settings including jamming and multi-user attacks.
• Thrust 4 develops a novel and powerful evaluation platform to experiment with hardware security methods in both the baseband and RF in a high throughput mmWave SDR.

People

The PIs on the team cover diverse expertise for the inter-disciplinary nature of the project:

• Sundeep Rangan (lead, wireless communications)
• Elza Erkip (information theory, communication theory)
• Ramesh Karri, Siddharth Garg (hardware security)
• Farshad Khorrami (security of cyber-physical systems)

Publications

See list here

Acknowledgements

This project is funded by NSF RINGS Award. The project is also supported in part by the industrial affiliates of NYU Wireless.