The NAU team, which includes professor of practice Bertrand Cambou<\/strong> and assistant professor Abolfazl Razi<\/strong>, will collaborate with Michael Kozicki and Hugh Barnaby of Arizona State University to enhance security solutions used in e-commerce, banking, smart cities, supply chains, smart health, machine-to-machine communications and the IoT.<\/p>\n Current methods of protecting devices from cyberattacks often are software-based, which limits the extent to which unique identifying properties can be used for secure authentication. The security platform Afghah and her team are developing is a software-hardware hybrid implementing physically unclonable functions that rely on the unique properties of a device\u2019s memory\u2014variabilities generated through the fabrication process\u2014to provide a technological \u201cfingerprint\u201d unique to each device.<\/p>\n The proposed solution uses ultra-low-power memory, such as resistive random access memory, making it more competitive because of its reduced consumption of power. Advanced error correction methods will help ensure authentication.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of our main contributions with this project designing new algorithms and mechanisms is to ensure that we can always correctly authenticate a device, no matter what physical environment it\u2019s in,\u201d Afghah said.<\/p>\n This three-year project is part of the NSF\u2019s Partnerships for Innovations Program, which offers researchers from all disciplines of science and engineering \u201cthe opportunity to perform translational research and technology development, catalyze partnerships and accelerate the transition of discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace for societal benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n The team will work with several industry partners, including BRIDG<\/span><\/a>, SecureFoundry<\/span><\/a> and Desert Microtechnology Associates, Inc.<\/span><\/a>, who will build these devices, evaluate their performance under a range of environmental conditions and manufacture cost-effective products that will be competitive in the marketplace.<\/p>\n [block-quote align=”center”]\u201cI<\/span>t could have a huge impact on society and on the economy by protecting millions of IoT devices against physical hijacking.\u201d<\/span>[\/block-quote]<\/p>\n \u201cIf we can make this happen, it will be a very competitive solution for the IoT, since, despite the current cryptographic methods where the cryptographic keys are stored in devices\u2019 memories, no security keys will be stored in the proposed security module,\u201d Afghah said. \u201cIt could have a huge impact on society and the economy by protecting millions of IoT devices against physical hijacking.\u201d<\/p>\n Afghah, who joined NAU in 2015, is the director of the Wireless Networking and Information Processing Laboratory<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0Her research focuses on machine learning and signal processing in different areas, including wireless communication systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, security systems and medical applications.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"Bertrand](\"http:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wordpresst\/uploads\/sites\/153\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/SICCSinventions20171019__58A2824-300x200.jpg\")
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