RINGS: Building Next Generation Resilient Wireless Systems from Unsecure Hardware

The design, manufacturing, and deployment of next generation (NextG) cellular wireless 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 critical of hardware components sourced from diverse manufacturers 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 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 station.

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 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 millimeter wave software defined radio.The PIs will disseminate the results and data to the wider community through workshops.

In addition, the PIs teach security and wireless classes at NYU and will integrate the research and experiments in their classes and class projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.