Infrastructure Systems

Modern Cybersecurity in IoT Devices

Led by Reza Azarderakhsh, Ph.D.

Dr Reza Azarderakhsh is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at Florida Atlantic University as well as an I-SENSE Research Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Western University. After that, he was an NSERC postdoc research fellow at the Center for Applied Cryptographic Research, Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo where he is currently an affiliate supervisor member of CryptoWorks21 there. He is also serving as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems (TCAS-I) Cryptographic Engineering Track. His research has been supported by NSF, NIST, Florida Center for Cyber Security (FC2), and Texas Instruments. His primary research interests are in cryptography and security, with particular interests in cryptographic engineering, side-channel analysis, elliptic curve cryptography, finite field arithmetic, post-quantum cryptography, and hardware/software implementations.

PROJECT

As information and data become more available, the security aspects get more and more challenging. Security and cryptographic engineering require a combined skills on mathematics, computer science, and computer engineering to contribute to field. Bad implementations of cryptographic algorithms are always considered as a target to the attackers. On the other hand, performance metrics of security as an add-on is important for real-world devices. We train students to gain experience on efficient and secure implementations of cryptographic algorithms in various IoT devices in both hardware and software. They mainly will focus on implementing post-quantum cryptography (aka quantum-resistant cryptography) in small, embedded devices securely with resources being at premium. Post-quantum cryptography is one of the national interest topics that the US government is pushing it forward and there will be a lot of work and research opportunities at academia as well as industry.