Naghmeh Karimi receives NSF CAREER award to develop long-lasting security for cryptographic chips

Naghmeh Karimi is the most recent UMBC faculty member to receive a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant, totaling approximately $500,000 over five years, will support her work to investigate how device-aging related risks compromise the security of cryptographic devices.

Karimi explains that cryptographic chips offer continued advances in authenticating messages and devices as well as preserving the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information. They do so by implementing cryptographic algorithms in hardware. These chips combine the benefits of cryptographic applications with the speed and power advantage of hardware implementations. 

Despite their significant benefits, cryptographic chips can be compromised by adversaries who have gained physical access to the chips. Current protections against such attacks do not consider the aging of devices, which can shift device parameters over time.

Addressing security vulnerabilities 

Aging makes cryptographic chips operate slower and, ultimately, results in their malfunction, says Karimi. She explains that the typical lifetime of integrated circuits is 7 to 8 years. As the devices age, their performance decreases. Karimi is exploring the specific security vulnerabilities of aged devices and how they can be protected.

“We want to preserve the security of devices over their lifetime,” Karimi says.

Karimi and her research team will study whether the success of the side-channel analysis and fault-injection attacks increase in older devices. Karimi will create and test several countermeasures to protect devices against such attacks.

Connecting students with opportunities in tech security

The CAREER Award funding will support several UMBC undergraduate and graduate student researchers working with Karimi to develop long-lasting security solutions for hardware platforms. 

At the same time, Karimi will also develop and launch a new course in UMBC’s computer science and electrical engineering department on cryptography, hardware security, and testing. She will also work with the UMBC Cyber Scholars Program to connect students with internship opportunities focused on hardware security, to give them additional hands-on experience in the field. 

“The success of this project will enable us to develop long-lasting security for trusted hardware platforms,” Karimi says. “This will result in aging-resistant security solutions that benefit society through devices that remain secure over their lifetime.”

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Banner image: UMBC’s ITE building. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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Applications are open through May 15th!

ur.umbc.edu/ura

UMBC researchers develop better techniques to
render video game characters with realistic skin

Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) have developed a new solution to render an essential detail in many video games: human skin. The research is published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques [1]. Marc Olano, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC, led this research alongside Tiantian Xie, Ph.D. ’22, computer science. Xie, under the guidance of Olano, has worked with researchers Brian Karis and Krzysztof Narkowicz at the gaming company Epic Games, developing a keen understanding of gamers’ user experience, including the precise level of realism and detail that players are looking for in human characters.

Game developers seek to create visuals that are as realistic as possible without stepping into the “uncanny valley.” This term describes when the graphics in a game attempt to portray a human as closely as possible, and gets close to mimicking real life, but not quite close enough, in a way users find disturbing. This creates an unpleasant feeling in users that might distract from their enjoyment of the game.

In many games, human skin is rendered in such a way that it looks like a plastic object. This plastic look can occur because animators aren’t accounting for subsurface scattering – a key element of how light interacts with a textured 3D surface. Subsurface scattering is animators’ main priority when it comes to transforming skin from looking like plastic to looking truly real.

Olano’s method builds upon research developed by large gaming companies to create realistic depictions of human skin that will also load quickly within a gaming interface. “Our method adds an ability to adaptively estimate how many samples you actually need to get the look that you want without having to do a lot of additional computation to get a smooth image,” explains Olano.

The method minimizes the amount of computation needed to create photo-realistic images. Previous techniques were either not realistic enough, or ran too slowly for use in games, negatively affecting the gaming experience. The new method is based on techniques developed for offline film production rendering. Xie, the first author of the paper, states, “Offline rendering techniques are not suitable for real-time rendering because adding the technique itself in real-time introduces a large overhead. Our technique eliminates this overhead.”

Olano and his team created an algorithm to determine the pixels that would need to be rendered differently than the others due to light gradient change. Their sampling method uses temporal variance to lower the overall number of changes within each frame while still maintaining a realistic depiction of subsurface scattering. Since fewer changes are needed per frame, the method creates an efficient way of rendering realistic skin within the capabilities of today’s computing power.

The algorithm used by Olano’s team is built upon a foundation of research that is known and accessible to game developers. This offers a promising path for the gaming industry to pursue realism while maintaining an awareness of the computational ability of an average gaming system. Developers may be able to begin using this technique soon to create more realistic human figures in games, growing the gaming market even more.

[1] Tiantian Xie, Marc Olano, Brian Karis, and Krzysztof Narkowicz. 2020. Real-time subsurface scattering with single pass variance-guided adaptive importance sampling. Proc. ACM Comput. Graph. Interact. Tech. 3, 1, Article 3 (Apr 2020), 21 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3384536

Adapted from a press release written by Morgan Zepp that appeared in EurikAlert.

The post UMBC researchers develop better techniques to render characters with realistic skin appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Dr. Vonhoff (Biological Sciences), and his mentee, Steve Park, show how easy it is to apply for an Undergraduate Research Award (URA), even in quarantine.

URAs provide up to $1,500 to undergraduate students to support their research, scholarship, or creative work with a UMBC faculty mentor on an original project. UMBC students of all years and disciplines are invited to apply, as long as they remain enrolled at UMBC long enough to complete the proposed work.

Deadline: May 15, 2020

Applications require a research proposal and mentor statement of support.

Speciality URAs will be awarded to Social Scientists and Entrepreneurs.

See:

ur.umbc.edu/ura

for more details.