Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Taking a byte out of Apple

Martha Bushong — Thu, 09 May 2024 11:36:28 +0000

Taking a byte out of Apple Martha Bushong Thu, 05/09/2024 - 07:36

A 2020 graduate of George Mason’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Iranian-born Farnoud Farahmand works for tech giant Apple in Silicon Valley doing a job he hadn’t thought about as an undergrad or even a grad student. Farahmand’s journey to California covered more miles than an American pioneer’s and his attitude mirrored the same qualities of curiosity, grit, and determination as those of Western settlers.

Farnoud Farahmand works on site at Apple in Silicon Valley three days a week.
Photo provided.

Farahmand said he chose Mason because he had family living in Virginia and found George Mason a good match for his goals, and his interest in digital design and embedded systems. “Mason had a good program. I saw there were some specializations in digital design and that was a great fit for me,” he said. Farahmand credits his PhD advisor, Professor Krzysztof (Kris) Gaj for teaching him the value of teamwork and nurturing his burgeoning curiosity.

“What I learned from Dr. Gaj was to be dedicated, do the hard work, and keep learning different topics. We used to have very long weekly meetings with him instead of meeting with each of his students in separately, he pulled us all together in one room at the same time,” said Farahmand. Sitting in long meetings with labmates, he learned about related topics and said that experience led him to his internships with Google.

Before the internship, Farahmand was focused on hardware implementation, but other people were working on side-channel analysis, and applied to Google online. “The thing is you don't know the positions. The job descriptions are very general when you apply for internships at Google. “The internship was mostly related to side-channel analysis but because I was in those meetings with Dr. Gaj and others for 2-3 years, I learned all these topics and then when I went for an interview when they asked all these questions, I was ready to answer.”

Farahmand’s advises current students to stay curious and don’t be afraid to learn about a different topic; take every chance you can to learn something new and different. “If I wanted to just focus on what I worked on from the beginning, which was doing digital design and implementing ciphers in hardware, then I maybe I wouldn’t have had the confidence for my internship interviews,” he said.

Farahmand thought that after interning successfully at Google he would be a good fit and applied for a job. Covid’s trajectory and downturn in the tech industry caused a detour that led him elsewhere. When he interviewed for a permanent position with Google, he said everything went well but at the height of the pandemic, the company wasn’t hiring. While he waited for Google’s hiring freeze to thaw, Apple came through with an offer.

That detour, and Farahmand’s new job, led to an opportunity in still another topic. The new job deals with modeling power based on the features that will be added in future generations of Apple electronics.

Farahmand had never worked on power optimization in his research but through his internship experience with side-channel analysis, its relationship to evaluating the power consumption of a chip, and power analysis and simulations, the hiring committee made the connection and offered him the position.

“It was a very good fit for the position and now that I’m working on it. I really like it. One thing that I see from students and for myself as well, we know very famous topics like digital design, verification, and physical design. These are very well-known positions, but sometimes there are available positions in good companies. We don't search for them, so we don't find them.” By keeping his options open, and looking for jobs in unexpected areas Farahmand discovered an unexpected path to success.

Topics

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

alumni

Tech Talent Investment Pipeline (TTIP)

TTIP

Tech Talent Investment Program

CEC Alumni

Teaching humans to play safe

Nathan Kahl — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 21:02:44 +0000

Teaching humans to play safe Nathan Kahl Mon, 03/04/2024 - 16:02

Autonomous systems can be programmed to always make the logical, “best” decisions, given a set of circumstances. But what happens when human judgment and decision-making is introduced to a system? Xuan Wang, an assistant professor in ��AV’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, is asking this question as part of a recent $344,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Wang stressed that this research is particularly important given technologies on the horizon. “The operation of many real-world systems involves the co-existence of human and autonomous agents. Inadequate coordination among these agents can lead to significant performance degradation or safety risks.”

Wang is turning the idea of humans controlling machines on its head. “The key novelty of this research is, instead of thinking about how humans can program robots, we are thinking about the ways that the autonomous agents can impact humans," he says. "Assuming human response can’t be coded in the way we can control a robotic agent’s behavior, then how we can design the robot’s behavior so they're impacting human behavior in a way that is beneficial for the overall system?”

In one of Wang's simulations, a human and robot carry a cup of hot water, testing programmed guarantees so that when the cup spills, it only spills to the robot side of the board, protecting the human. Photo provided.

Because human agents, who are very diverse, use observations to see occurrences in the world around them and respond accordingly, traditional optimization approaches are less effective at predicting behavior. Wang says that he’ll use a framework relying on game theory, which assumes each agent has their own objective function, and that function is coupled with another agent’s decisions and actions. Then both human and autonomous agents ideally will optimize their overall behavior to coordinate across a whole system, creating a better output.

This human-response alignment mechanism is bidirectional, allowing for communication moving in opposite ways at the same time. For robots, they will investigate new approaches that allow them to adapt more intelligently to human behaviors with uncertainties; for humans, they will study how they can be incentivized during human-robot interaction so that human responses favor the efficiency and robustness of the entire system.

But how can systems—autonomous or controlled by humans—ever guarantee safety, say in the use of unpersoned vehicles?

Wang says, “When we are deriving safety criteria, there might be some uncertainties, so given the inputs of the system there will be an upper and lower bound that allows you to know what is the worst case that will happen. Given that, if all assumptions are satisfied, one can guarantee that there will be no crash.”

Wang and team are also working with the Army Research Lab to develop collaborative autonomous vehicles working in unknown environments, ensuring the vehicles can coordinate and gain advantage when there are potential threats in the environment.

In This Story

Xuan Wang

Topics

robotics and autonomous systems

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

human-computer interaction

Artificial Intelligence

National Science Foundation

Research

CEC faculty research

Tech Talent Investment Pipeline (TTIP)

TTIP

Tech Talent Investment Program

Parsa joins three-year, $2.4 million 3D chip creation project

Teresa Donnellan — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 21:10:09 +0000

Parsa joins three-year, $2.4 million 3D chip creation project Teresa Donnellan Fri, 11/10/2023 - 16:10

In This Story

Maryam Parsa

The hippocampus stores memories and makes connections between them, recognizing trends and helping the brain to learn and adapt to its environment. One Mason professor has joined a cross-university, interdisciplinary team to create a chip that can do the same.

Maryam Parsa, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is one of the four principal investigators on a three-year, $2.4 million project funded by the National Science Foundation to create chips that processes information like the hippocampus.

Maryam Parsa with her ��AV research group.

The project, DEJA-VU, involves four principal investigators: Maryam Parsa from ��AV, Akhilesh Jaiswal from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (project PI), Babak Shahbaba, and Norbert Fortin both from the University of California, Irvine. Each collaborator will contribute their special skills to create 3D Solid-State Learning Machines for Various Cognitive Use-Cases. The project will model and quantify key information processing steps in the hippocampus. These key hippocampal functions will then be embedded on to solid-state computing chips through state-of-the-art hardware design techniques. A hippocampal-aware, hardware-aware algorithmic framework will augment the chip design efforts to enable online learning and decision-making in resource constrained environments.

“The project has potential disruptive applications in the field of robotics and autonomous systems spanning industrial, consumer and defense sectors,” said Parsa. She added, “The transformative potential of the project emerges from research conducted at three different levels of abstractions of neuroscience, hardware, and algorithm.”

Parsa’s portion of the project is $550,000 for the development of the hippocampal-aware, hardware-aware learning algorithm.

Topics

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

National Science Foundation

Research

C-TASC

Amazon develops data center engineering curriculum with Mason

Colleen Rich — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 17:09:51 +0000

Amazon develops data center engineering curriculum with Mason Colleen Rich Wed, 07/26/2023 - 13:09

In This Story

��AV is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop a course in data center engineering and expand the opportunities in its senior capstone courses.

Photo by Getty Images

Faculty in Mason’s College of Engineering and Computing are developing the ME/ECE 499: Data Center Engineering course, which will be offered for the first time this fall. The course, which will be crosslisted in the Mechanical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments, will introduce students to data center infrastructure design, operations, efficiency, cooling, and decarbonization.

Students will learn to design, operate, and maintain the hardware required for complex data center systems. The instructor will bring real-world industry experience into the classroom, and the class will have the opportunity to tour nearby data center facilities.

“We are happy to partner with ��AV and look forward to utilizing this collaboration to help students engage in critical research,” said Nicholas Lee-Romagnolo, program manager of Workforce and Economic Development at AWS. “Our goal is that the program helps prepare students to enter the tech field after their time at Mason, equipped to create solutions to the challenges faced by data center engineers.”

Through the course, students will gain hands-on experience and learn from experts in the field, such as guest speakers who will discuss data center career paths.

Across the Washington, D.C., metro area, there is a greater need for both mechanical and electrical engineering talent. The data center engineering course will help students gain experience, build on their skills, and prepare to enter the workforce as part of Mason’s commitment to feeding the ever-increasing tech talent pipeline for Virginia and beyond.

Kammy Sanghera, executive director of the Institute for Digital Innovation (IDIA), is coordinating the effort with Liza Wilson Durant, associate dean for strategic initiatives and community engagement in the College of Engineering and Computing.

“The data center engineering job market is exploding in Virginia, and our partnership with Amazon to provide real-world, hands-on training in this new area will position Mason engineers with the skills and knowledge to move out and lead in this emerging technical discipline,” Durant said. “Mason's strategic alliance with Amazon is enabling us to embed the skills and knowledge required of the engineer of the future and position our graduates for success.”

“We are excited to introduce the data center course and are looking forward to our continued partnership with Amazon,” Sanghera said. “This is another opportunity for Mason and its industry collaborators to provide unique experiences for students to engage in cutting-edge research and obtain the skills necessary to be successful in the ever-growing tech and engineering fields in Virginia and beyond.”

Earlier this year, AWS challenged Mason engineering students to create an evaporative cooler and test the effectiveness of evaporative media. AWS funded students for their design implementation of capstone project. This AWS capstone project was the first of its kind at Mason, and two similar capstones projects are planned for this fall—one in mechanical engineering, another in electrical engineering.

The two projects will be mentored by CEC professors Nathan Kathir and Tolga Soyata respectively, and students will have an opportunity to gain expert technical advice directly from Amazon engineers. The electrical engineering capstone project will give students a hands-on experience building a data center power monitoring system.

“We are looking forward to the Mechanical Engineering capstone this fall,” said Mason professor Leigh McCue, chair of Mason’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “These courses provide our students with opportunities to expand upon what they have learned in class and apply the skills they’ve learned to creating important solutions to real-world problems.”

“We are excited to partner with Amazon and to bring more opportunities for our students to learn, grow, and prepare to become part of the expanding data center engineering industry in Virginia,” said Mason professor Pelin Kurtay, associate chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, who is leading the effort for ECE.

Topics

Campus News

Amazon Web Services

College of Engineering and Computing

innovative classes

Strategic Direction

mechanical engineering

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Andre Manitius honored with the David J. King Teaching Award

Rena Malai — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 12:56:49 +0000

Andre Manitius honored with the David J. King Teaching Award Rena Malai Thu, 06/30/2022 - 08:56

Andre Manitius, ECE professor
Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services/
��AV

Professor Andre Manitius, of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), received the David J. King Teaching Award at the university’s Celebration of Teaching Excellence on May 2. This award is given annually in recognition of a sustained impact on the excellence of teaching and learning at ��AV. The award recognizes the vision and leadership that supports the excellence of teaching and learning, rather than classroom teaching alone and it is given once a year to one faculty member who has worked at Mason for at least twenty years.

Manitius, who has been at Mason for 34 years, was recognized for laying a foundation for sustained and lasting impact in multiple departments as well as at the college and the university. His nomination highlighted how he has focused on holistic and sustainable change. For example, he not only led to the creation or substantial enhancement of degree programs -- such as the BS in bioengineering or the MS in applied information technology -- but he recruited diverse faculty for those programs. He also mentored those new faculty and developed or supported administrative roles such as an associate chair for graduate programs and departmental ABET coordinator to support the work of faculty and students in those programs. Finally, he built strong partnerships with industry leaders to give them ongoing feedback.

Manutius's vision and coordination were crucial in establishing the first MS program in computer forensics in the nation. The MS in computer engineering, one of his early projects, is now poised to be a centerpiece of the College of Engineering and Computing and its work with the Tech Talent Investment Program to increase the number of students with computing degrees in Virginia. Manutius's forward-thinking mindset extends to his teaching as he was an early proponent of computer labs to promote hands-on instruction in programs like MATLAB, one of the early participants in a China 2+2 structure, a strong supporter of project-based learning, and an early adopter of asynchronous online pedagogies.

As he helped grow student enrollment in programs like information technology, Manitius also hired and supported new academic advisers, and helped coordinate the program to ensure a smooth and sustainable pathway for students in Northern Virginia to matriculate at Mason. By doing this he helped create strong foundations on which others can build.

“I feel very honored by this award, which reflects favorably on the ECE Department. Whatever I did to deserve this award is owed to a great collaboration of the ECE faculty, for which I am thankful,” says Manitius. He says his outlook on his teaching career can be summed up by the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, a 19th-century Scottish novelist, and poet who said, "Do not judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant."

Topics

Awards

Computer Engineering

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Two papers gain recognition in the hardware security field

Rena Malai — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 19:28:12 +0000

Two papers gain recognition in the hardware security field Rena Malai Fri, 02/25/2022 - 14:28

In This Story

Khaled Khasawneh

Khaled N. Khasawneh (at right), assistant
professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, works alongside PHD student Behnam Omidi.

Khaled N. Khasawneh, assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at ��AV, contributed significant research and work to two papers which have been recognized in the area of hardware security.

Researchers in Khasawneh’s CAMLsec Lab Identified a New Vulnerability in the Cloud Scheduler

A paper entitled “Repttack: Exploiting Cloud Schedulers to Guide Co-Location Attacks” was written as part of a collaborative research effort with University of California (UC)- Davis and ��AV. Along with his collaborators at UC Davis, Khasawneh helped to discover a new vulnerability in cloud schedulers, which could inadvertently allow targeted micro-architectural attacks in the cloud. This paper pointed out that certain features in the cloud scheduler enables arbitrary users to influence scheduling results. This can help attackers co-locate attacker’s code with a targeted victim’s code in a heterogeneous cloud, which enables a wide variety of micro-architectural attacks that leak sensitive data.

“The current design of scheduling algorithms in the cloud focuses on enhancing workloads performance, resource utilization, and load-balancing without security considerations, which may bring new vulnerability as we showed in our work,” says Khasawneh.

The paper is accepted for publication at the 2022 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), and will be presented there in April.

This paper is co-authored with Behnam Omidi, a second year PHD student within the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His research focuses on discovering systems vulnerabilities and hardware support to secure computing systems.

Khasawneh—Omidi’s advisor-- says this paper was a great opportunity to gain useful knowledge as it was a tremendous collaborative effort between both schools.

“I’m more of an expert in microarchitecral attacks, and our co-collaborators at UC Davis, led by Dr. Homayoun, brings expertise of cloud computing and resource scheduling,” says Khasawneh.

Khasawneh’s Paper Selected as a Top Pick in Architecture and Hardware Security 2021

A paper co-authored by Khasawneh was selected as a Top Pick in Architecture and Hardware Security 2021.

The top picks in architecture and embedded security represent the top and most impactful papers that have been published in the area in the last six years, from 2015 to 2020. Top picks are selected from conference papers that have appeared in leading hardware security conferences including but not limited to DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASPDAC, HOST, Asian HOST, GLSVLSI, VLSI Design, CHES, ETS, VTS, ITC, S&P, Usenix Security, CCS, NDSS, ISCA, MICRO, ASPLOS, HPCA, HASP, ACSAC, Euro S&P, and Asia CCS.

The top pick paper is titled “Spectre Returns! Speculation Attacks using the Return Stack Buffer ” and had previously won the best paper award in the USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT) in 2018. This paper discovers a new class of Spectre attack, called SpectreRSB, that exploits the return stack buffer (RSB), which is used in modern CPUs to help predict return addresses, instead of the branch predictor unit. SpectreRSB allows malicious software to steal passwords, keys, and other sensitive information, from memory it shouldn't be allowed to touch.

According to Khasawneh, Linux kernel released a patch to protect against SpectreRSB vulnerability (CVE-2018-15572).

Topics

grants

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

College of Engineering and Computing

data

C-TASC

Mason Engineering professor inspires and mentors women in STEM

Martha Bushong — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 18:12:11 +0000

Mason Engineering professor inspires and mentors women in STEM Martha Bushong Mon, 08/30/2021 - 14:12

In This Story

Nathalia Peixoto

Nathalia Peixoto (on left) works with graduate students in the Neural Engineering Lab. Photo by Evan Cantwell

When Nathalia Peixoto was growing up in Brazil, she told people she wanted to be a teacher and an engineer when she grew up.

“My brother and sister made fun of me, saying that those don’t go together,” says Peixoto, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and an affiliate faculty member with the Department of Bioengineering. “My mom never finished her first year of college, so it was not clear that anyone in our family would go to college.”

But Peixoto was determined. She went to a vocational-technical school instead of a traditional high school and became a technician in electronics and robotics, working with five engineers. “When I disagreed with them, or they asked me to do things that I thought were wrong, they said, ‘Unless you have a bachelor’s degree, you can’t call any shots.’”

So Peixoto went on to get an undergraduate degree, PhD, then conduct research at the University of Bonn in Germany as well as Stanford University before coming to Mason in 2004 as a post-doc in the physics department. She joined the Volgenau School of Engineering in 2006 as an assistant professor in ECE.

Now Peixoto is living her childhood dream, combining her love for teaching and engineering while mentoring young women, like herself, who had to overcome obstacles to become engineers. “I prefer to help people who have difficulties navigating the academic world,” says Peixoto, who won Mason’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2015.

As a supervisor for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), she meets with minority students, sharing stories of her journey, providing guidance on job searches and applying to graduate school, and tips on finding a lab to conduct research while an undergraduate.

She has worked with students she met in classes, in the hallway, through other professors, during her presentations to middle and high school students, and at Mason’s Aspiring Scientist Summer Internship Program.

Peixoto estimates she has mentored hundreds of students over the years, often supervising their research projects. Currently, she is overseeing nine independent research projects led by high school and undergraduate students, three ECE senior design team projects, as well as three research projects in her Neural Engineering Lab, which is affiliated with both the ECE and Bioengineering departments and is part of the Institute for Biohealth Innovation. 

Her high school, undergraduate, and graduate students perform team-based projects on assistive technology, wearable embedded systems, and neural implants.

“One of the things I’ve learned is that our best students bloom if you give them freedom,” Peixoto says.

For one of her funded research projects, a graduate student is creating a device that uses wireless signals to detect people’s heart rate and breath behind walls of rubble. “It could be used to detect a person who was buried because of an earthquake or in a war zone,” she says.

The U.S. Air Force is funding the project. “There’s a lot of math behind it and hardware/software development to be done to make it work, but I am hopeful it will be really useful.”

For another project, she’s working with an epidemiologist to develop a portable robot that can collect ticks, which will help for research on tick-borne diseases.

In another, she’s working with a Social Work professor at Mason on virtual-reality tools to help people who are recovering from addiction. Her expertise here is on analyzing brain signals and the physiological state of the user during exposure to triggers.

She is also a co-investigator on a prestigious Research Traineeship grant of nearly $3 million from the National Science Foundation to cross-train graduate students over the next five years.

Peixoto appreciates the flexibility she has at Mason to wear many hats. “I have the perfect balance of how much I can interact with students, how much I can mentor them, and I can allow them to do whatever research they want.

“After students leave Mason, they often keep in touch and let me know how their professional and personal lives are going,” she says. “Their stories become part of mine, they always have their experiences at Mason impact them, and it is gratifying for me to see and be part of that.”

Topics

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

diversity

ASSIP

Senior sees public speaking as a key to success in engineering

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 15:29:59 +0000

Senior sees public speaking as a key to success in engineering Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/11/2021 - 10:29

Electrical engineering student Jazzmin Robinson knows the value public speaking skills hold for a career in engineering.

Jazzmin Robinson credits her industry and student organization experience for pushing her out of her comfort zone. Photo Provided.

A senior, Robinson’s wake-up call with stage fright was during a presentation at her first big internship with the Department of Defense. “I never knew this about myself, and my friends and supervisors were shocked that I was so terrified,” she says.

This moment was a turning point for Robinson. She knew then that to become a successful engineer she needed to find ways to utilize the many organizations across the Mason community to become a leader on ��AV’s Fairfax Campus.

“I always enjoyed being involved, but the day that I realized my fear of public speaking was pretty crippling, that added to my motivation,” says Robinson.

A Richmond, Virginia native, Robinson has now held six leadership positions at Mason. Currently, she is the public relations chair for the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) region two executive board and the vice president for NSBE’s collegiate chapter. She is also secretary for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.

“The organizations I’ve been a part of have given me so much exposure and leadership experience, and it has given me much more confidence in presenting and public speaking,” she says.

Robinson sees the skill as crucial to a successful engineering career because of the collaborative nature of the field. “In NSBE, IEEE, and others, we have to work together to reach specific outcomes. But at the end of the day, we need to be able to mentor others and tell outsiders all that we’ve done,” she says. “In engineering, you need to similarly communicate with other stakeholders on projects you are working on.”

In other internships and even her senior design project, the importance of leadership and speaking skills held constant. Sometimes in our engineering education, we are so busy learning theories or principles, that the communication skills fall behind, says Robinson. But she thinks that all students should find a way to build a communications and leadership toolkit.

As a student leader, she has made it a mission to help other students develop these skills. As NSBE’s regional public relations chair, she started a new initiative to try and expose collegiate NSBE leaders to how the regional team operates. “NSBE at the collegiate level has a pretty big structure, with more than 500 chapters, there are regional teams that oversee collegiate chapters, and I felt it could be beneficial for collegiate members to see how the regional team runs,” she says. “Past leaders in the student organizations I’ve been in have really inspired me to be a better leader.”

After her graduation in May, Robinson plans to take these skills into whatever career she chooses, but she admits she will miss the collaborative nature at Mason. “I love it at Mason, and I’ve been able to learn so much. While I am excited to get my career started, I will miss Mason for sure.”

Topics

Electrical Engineering

Volgenau School of Engineering

National Society of Black Engineers

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Students

Researchers receive over $1.5 million from DARPA to optimize security and energy tradeoff

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 17:47:20 +0000

Researchers receive over $1.5 million from DARPA to optimize security and energy tradeoff Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/02/2021 - 12:47

Topics

Cyber Security Research

Cybersecurity

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

In This Story

Brian Mark

Khaled Khasawneh

Kai Zeng

Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao

Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao, Kai Zeng, Khaled Khasawneh, and Brian Mark are collaborating with researchers at Virginia Tech to optimize the safety and energy-efficient tradeoff.

The capabilities and reach of 5G are expanding, but with new capabilities come new security challenges. Four Mason Engineering researchers received a $1.6 million grant from DARPA to tackle one of the many security issues that 5G poses as part of a larger DARPA initiative called Open, Programmable, Secure 5G (OPS-5G).

The grant, entitled EPIC SWaPD: Energy Preserving Internet of Things (IoT) Cryptography for Small Weight and Power Devices, aims to optimize the security and energy efficiency tradeoff by creating a low-energy security architecture for various types of IoT devices.

“In a network, there are many different devices of different sizes and capabilities. Many of these devices don’t have much computing power or battery life, and a common cybersecurity attack on these devices is to drain their battery life,” says Brian Mark, co-principal investigator on the grant.

Mark, Khaled Khasawneh, Kai Zeng, and Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are collaborating with the company Kryptowire and Assistant Professor Matthew Hicks from Virginia Tech for the project.

These small IoT devices could be as simple as a thermometer or humidity sensor that is part of a larger smart home system. “These sensors can be very tiny, and they have limited computation and communication capabilities. The first step for each of these types of sensors would be to bootstrap, or link, a secure connection to the network, which requires authentication without pre-shared secrets. This is where the vulnerabilities lie,” says Kai Zeng.

When sensors or other types of small IoT devices must automatically authenticate themselves, attackers have many paths of attack. They can drain the device's battery, rendering it useless, or steal sensitive information or data from the device. Because of the many pathways that attackers could use to harm these devices, the team is combining cryptography, network protocol design, and machine learning to assure the success and scalability of their efforts.

“Something really important for this effort is that the security architecture operates on the principles of zero trust and least privilege,” says Mark. “Zero trust means that when a device comes in and wants to join the network, the assumption is that there is no prior trust or information shared between the devices, while least privilege implies the minimum permissions are granted to the entity to perform its task. So, we needed to bootstrap the security association and grant an entity just enough authority to access the devices or data that it needs but no more than that.”

One way they are looking at securing the connection is through gait-inspired authentication, which leverages the kinetic energy generated by a human user. “Every device harvests energy in a different way, and we use the harvesting pattern for authentication of the device, which preserves energy and accomplishes a security task at the same time,” says Dinakarrao.

Another approach is to exploit the “always-on” sensors in some devices like smartphones. “We plan to employ always-on sensing to perform the exchange of device identification and cryptographic material,” says Khasawneh.

They are also using machine learning to ensure both authentication and authorization of different devices. “We not only have to authenticate the devices and entities that are allowed on a network, but we have to verify their different roles and privileges. I might be granted access to the information that tells me the temperature of a room, but perhaps I might not have the authorization to change the thermostat setting,” says Mark. “Using graph-based models, we can verify the trust relationships of different devices or entities and this process can be accelerated using machine learning techniques,” adds Dinakarrao.

Long-term, the team aspires for their security architecture to easily be applied to other devices. “When we talk about the energy and security tradeoff, we have to think about how we can do things in a smart way to conserve energy while enhancing security. But we also need to think about how to make our architecture scalable to larger, more geographically distributed networks. Right now, this work is with smaller devices, but the hope is that our overall security architecture can apply to a variety of devices with different capabilities,” says Mark.

Advisor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering wins academic advising award

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:12:31 +0000

Advisor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering wins academic advising award Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/11/2021 - 11:12

One of the rewards of being an academic advisor is helping students through difficult times and then watching them flourish afterward, says Smriti Kansal Patwardhan, an academic advisor and coordinator for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

For instance, when an international student came to talk to Patwardhan a few years ago, she was homesick, hadn’t connected with anyone, and felt all alone, says Patwardhan, MS Electrical Engineering ’04. “Engineering is hard enough, and she was trying to manage all these emotions on top of her studies.”

She found the young woman a study group and a student organization with members from her home country. “I helped her adjust through that first year, and she blossomed and graduated with honors.”

Patwardhan is known among Mason Engineering students and faculty for her willingness to go the extra mile in all aspects of her job, and for those efforts, she was awarded the 2020 Jade Barricelli Spirit of Academic Advising Excellence Award, a peer-nominated academic advising award.

In 2016, she was named the V. Ann Lewis Academic Advisor of the Year, an award given to an advisor nominated by students.

Patwardhan didn’t plan on becoming an advisor. In fact, she didn’t have an advisor when she was an undergraduate earning a bachelor of engineering in electronics in India.

After graduation, she worked as an engineer in India then came to Mason to earn her master’s degree. She started to pursue a PhD while working as a research faculty member, but after her first child was born in 2006, she decided to take a break from work.

Then in 2012, the ECE department asked her to come back as an advisor. “It was all a new experience for me. I had no clue of what to do and what not to do,” she says.

She got input and guidance from faculty and peers and quickly excelled in her new role.

Now she conducts the orientations of all the new ECE students, hosts prospective student visits for the department, and advises several groups including Honors College students, those in special international programs, and anyone who can’t find a faculty advisor.

She works closely with the department’s faculty who are advising other ECE students. “All 600 undergraduate students can come to me whenever they want.”

In addition, Patwardhan reviews course evaluations, works on the department’s undergraduate curriculum committee, helps with class scheduling, and coordinates the publication of the department’s newsletter.

Her technical knowledge often comes in handy. “My engineering background helps. I tell students, ‘I am an engineer. Don’t take these courses together, because I know this will make it too hard for you to be successful.’ And they listen to me.

“When people bring in transfer credits, I know what makes sense to count and what doesn’t make sense.”

The hardest part of her job is not being able to help everyone and making tough decisions. There are so many challenges our students go through––health problems, financial problems, family problems. I want to do everything I possibly can to make school easier for my students.”

Monson Hayes, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says, “She is a remarkable advisor who is committed to being the most effective advisor that she can be. Her approach to advising is one of compassion and understanding, and she is keenly aware of the struggles and difficulties a student may face, both academically and personally. She is a great listener. She is never judgmental, and she is an extremely effective communicator.”

ECE Associate Chair Pelin Kurtay, agrees, “Smriti is an indispensable asset to our faculty advisors and plays a tremendous role in the success of our students. Her knowledge about policies and university resources, coupled with her background in engineering, means she can quickly provide students with access to the support they need, bring a swift resolution to their issues, and provide a personalized plan that best meets their individual needs.”

Patwardhan is passionate about her job. “I love it,” she says. “I am an engineer helping future engineers.”

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