Shreyas Sen, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Shreyas Sen, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, has received Intel's 2020 Outstanding Researcher Award (ORA). Sen is one of 18 leading academic researchers worldwide being recognized for exceptional contributions through university-sponsored Intel research.

Sen is being recognized for a project entitled “Ground-Up Root-Cause-Analysis Guided Low-Overhead Generic Countermeasures for Power and Electromagnetic Side Channel Attacks.” The power and electromagnetic (EM) side-channel (SC), which allows extraction of secret keys from unintentional powers signatures/EM emanations, poses a serious threat to security of computing devices. Sen’s research will use EM analysis skills to treat the EM SC source as a “white-box” and pinpoint the critical information leakage sources.

“I believe, Security vulnerabilities for which the source can be traced back to hardware, understanding the root cause down to the physics level and addressing the problem at the hardware-level allows the highest protection with the least power and performance overhead,” says Sen. “In this project, we have shown one such example of achieving over 100 X benefit in side-channel attack resilience. I see the possibility of application of the philosophy of ground-up analysis and low-level protection in many other aspects of hardware security in the years to come.”

Sen says his time and experience with colleagues at Intel labs has taught him a lot about how to take engineering and technological advances and translate them into tangible product impact.

“When moving to academia it was always a dream to develop new inventions that impact our industry partners,” says Sen. “I would like to sincerely thank Intel for supporting our research from very early stage and for the close collaboration leading to the demonstration of impactful results in Electromagnetic Hardware Security.”

Sen says the collaboration also served as a perfect training ground for graduate students through close mentoring from Intel and internship opportunities. Intel sponsors and works alongside academic researchers around the globe in areas such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and other emerging, innovative technologies. Every year, the company recognizes exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research.