Research

Secure and Efficient Internet of Body using Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication

Radiative communication using electro-magnetic (EM) fields amongst the wearable and implantable devices act as the backbone for information exchange around a human body, thereby enabling prime applications in the fields of connected healthcare, electroceuticals, neuroscience, augmented and virtual reality. However, owing to such radiative nature of the traditional wireless communication, EM signals propagate in all directions, inadvertently allowing an eavesdropper to intercept the information. In this context, the human body, primarily due to its high water content, has emerged as a medium for low-loss transmission, termed human body communication (HBC), enabling energy-efficient means for wearable communication. However, conventional HBC implementations suffer from significant radiation which also compromises security. In this work, we develop Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication (EQS-HBC), a method for localizing signals within the body using low-frequency carrier-less (broadband) transmission, thereby making it extremely difficult for a nearby eavesdropper to intercept critical private data, thus producing a covert communication channel, i.e. the human body. This work, for the first time, demonstrates and analyzes the improvement in private space enabled by EQS-HBC. Detailed experiments, supported by theoretical modeling and analysis, reveal that the quasi-static (QS) leakage due to the on-body EQS-HBC transmitter-human body interface is detectable up to <0.15 m, whereas the human body alone leaks only up to ~0.01 m, compared to >5 m detection range for on-body EM wireless communication, highlighting the underlying advantage of EQS-HBC to enable covert communication. Prof. Shreyas Sen explaining Physical Security of BAN


Key publication:

  • D. Das, S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, and S. Sen, "Enabling Covert Body Area Network using Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication," in Scientific Reports (Nature)- Feb 2019 [Online]
  • M. Nath, S. Maity, S. Avlani, S. Weigand and S. Sen, "Inter-Body Coupling in Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication: Theory and Analysis of Security and Interference Properties"arxiv, March 2020. [Online]
  • S. Maity, M. He, M. Nath, D. Das, B. Chatterjee, and S. Sen, "BioPhysical Modeling, Characterization and Optimization of Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication," in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME), Jun 2019 [Online]
  • S. Maity, M. Nath, G. Bhattacharya, B. Chatterjee, S. Weigand, J. Parshall and S. Sen, "On the Safety of Human Body Communication,” in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME), accepted Jan 20, 2020. [Online]

Efficient Internet Body-area Network using Broadband Human Body Communication

The human body could be used as a very good conductor because of its high water content, allowing low-loss broadband communication. However, it picks up interference from the world around it, such as FM radio signals. The Purdue technology suppresses those interfering signals to allow for improved communication between devices. Our technology uses the human body as a ‘wire’ and demonstrated greater than an order of magnitude lower-energy per communicated bit compared to the state-of-the-art design and about 100 times lower energy compared to today’s wireless BAN.


Key publication:

  • S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, G. Chang and S. Sen, "A 6.3pJ/b 30Mbps -30dB SIR-tolerant Broadband Interference-Robust Human Body Communication Transceiver using Time Domain Signal-Interference Separation," in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2018) - presenting world's lowest energy HBC transceiver[Online]
  • S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, G. Chang and S. Sen, "BodyWire: A 6.3pJ/b 30Mbps -30dB SIR-tolerant Broadband Interference-Robust Human Body Communication Transceiver using Time Domain Interference Rejection," in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC) - describing world's lowest energy HBC transceiver[Online]
  • S. Maity, N. Modak, D. Yang, S. Avlani, M. Nath, J. Danial, D. Das, P. Mehrotra, S. Sen, “A 415 nW Physically and Mathematically Secure Electro-Quasistatic HBC Node in 65nm CMOS for Authentication and Medical Applications,” in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2020) [Online]
  • B. Chatterjee, …, S. Sen, “A Context-aware Reconfigurable Transmitter with 2.24 pJ/bit, 802.15.6 NB-HBC and 4.93 pJ/bit, 400.9 MHz MedRadio Modes with 33.6% Transmit Efficiency,” in IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC 2020) [Online]

Security: Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attack

When 'mathematically secure' cryptographic cores are implemented on physical substrates they leak correlated information through unintended physical ‘side-channels’, such as power, electromagnetic(EM) radiation, acoustic, temperature etc. Side-channel attack (SCA) using electromagnetic (EM) radiation is a prominent tool to extract the secret key of an encryption device. This work investigates the root-cause behind the genesis of this EM leakage, presents the first ‘White-Box Model’ of EM Side-Channel Leakage and leverages it to develop an energy-efficient countermeasure using a signature attenuation hardware (SAH) to prevent such attacks on cryptographic ICs. More details can be found in the paper below:


Key publication:

  • D. Das , J. Danial, A. Golder, N. Modak, S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, D. Seo, M. Chang, A. Varna, H. Krishnamurthy, S. Mathew, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, “EM and Power SCA-resilient AES-256 in 65nm CMOS through >350x Current Domain Signature Attenuation,” in IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2020)
  • D. Das, J. Danial, A. Golder, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, "X-DeepSCA: Cross-Device Deep Learning Side Channel Atack," in ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC 2019) [Online ]
  • D. Das , J. Danial, A. Golder, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, “Deep Learning Side-Channel Attack Resilient AES-256 using Current Domain Signature Attenuation in 65nm CMOS,” in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2020) [Online]
  • D. Das, S. Maity, S. Nasir, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, "High Efficiency Power Side-Channel Attack Immunity using Noise Injection in Attenuated Signature Domain," in IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST 2017) - Best Student Paper Award [Online]
  • B. Chatterjee, D. Das and S. Sen, "RF-PUF: IoT Security Enhancement through Authentication of Wireless Nodes using In-situ Machine Learning," in IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST 2018) - Best Poster Award [Online]
  • D. Das, M. Nath, B. Chatterjee, S. Ghosh, and S. Sen, "STELLAR: A Generic EM Side-Channel Attack Protection through Ground-Up Root-cause Analysis," in IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST 2019) - Best Student Paper Award [Online]
  • B. Chatterjee, D. Das, S. Maity and S. Sen, "RF-PUF: Enhancing IoT Security through Authentication of Wireless Nodes using In-situ Machine Learning," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal (JIoT) [Online]

Time-Based High-Resolution Energy-Resolution Scalable Biosensing

In this work, we are developing the first monolithic CMOS radiation to digital converter, which consists of a floating-gate radiation sensor and a time-based resistance-to-digital-converter (RDC). The time-based RDC exhibits in-field resolution-energy scalability by controlling the total integrated time for measurement. Time-based sensing provides high-resolution (18 bit) by utilizing the availability of time, for extra low-frequency (ELF) application with ultra-low power (861nW). This research will enable wearable devices for real-time sensing of radiation exposure, for example in scenarios involving healthcare workers in a hospital setting during medical procedures (e.g. Chest CT-SCAN).


Key publication:

  • Baibhab Chatterjee, Charilaos Mousoulis, Shovan Maity, Anurag Kumar, Sean Scott, Daniel Valentino, Dimitrios Peroulis and Shreyas Sen, "A Wearable Real-time CMOS Dosimeter with Integrated Zero-bias Floating Gate Sensor and an 861nW 18-bit Energy-Resolution Scalable Time-based Radiation to Digital Converter," in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2019) - Best Paper Award [ Online]
  • B. Chatterjee, Charilaos Mousoulis, DongHyun Seo, Anurag Kumar, S. Maity, Sean Scott, Daniel Valentino, Dimitrios Peroulis and Shreyas Sen, "A Wearable Real-time CMOS Dosimeter with Integrated Zero-bias Floating Gate Sensor and an 861nW 18-bit Energy-Resolution Scalable Time-based Radiation to Digital Converter,” in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC) - Invited journal version of CICC Best Paper [Online]


Secure and Efficient Internet of Body using Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication

Radiative communication using electro-magnetic (EM) fields amongst the wearable and implantable devices act as the backbone for information exchange around a human body, thereby enabling prime applications in the fields of connected healthcare, electroceuticals, neuroscience, augmented and virtual reality. However, owing to such radiative nature of the traditional wireless communication, EM signals propagate in all directions, inadvertently allowing an eavesdropper to intercept the information. In this context, the human body, primarily due to its high water content, has emerged as a medium for low-loss transmission, termed human body communication (HBC), enabling energy-efficient means for wearable communication. However, conventional HBC implementations suffer from significant radiation which also compromises security. In this work, we develop Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication (EQS-HBC), a method for localizing signals within the body using low-frequency carrier-less (broadband) transmission, thereby making it extremely difficult for a nearby eavesdropper to intercept critical private data, thus producing a covert communication channel, i.e. the human body. This work, for the first time, demonstrates and analyzes the improvement in private space enabled by EQS-HBC. Detailed experiments, supported by theoretical modeling and analysis, reveal that the quasi-static (QS) leakage due to the on-body EQS-HBC transmitter-human body interface is detectable up to <0.15 m, whereas the human body alone leaks only up to ~0.01 m, compared to >5 m detection range for on-body EM wireless communication, highlighting the underlying advantage of EQS-HBC to enable covert communication. Prof. Shreyas Sen explaining Physical Security of BAN


Key publication:

  • D. Das, S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, and S. Sen, "Enabling Covert Body Area Network using Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication," in Scientific Reports (Nature)- Feb 2019 [Online]
  • M. Nath, S. Maity, S. Avlani, S. Weigand and S. Sen, “Inter-Body Coupling in Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication: Theory and Analysis of Security and Interference Properties”, arxiv, March 2020. [Online]
  • S. Maity, M. He, M. Nath, D. Das, B. Chatterjee, and S. Sen, "BioPhysical Modeling, Characterization and Optimization of Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication," in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME), Jun 2019 [Online]
  • S. Maity, M. Nath, G. Bhattacharya, B. Chatterjee, S. Weigand, J. Parshall and S. Sen, "On the Safety of Human Body Communication,” in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME), accepted Jan 20, 2020. [Online]

Efficient Internet Body-area Network using Broadband Human Body Communication

The human body could be used as a very good conductor because of its high water content, allowing low-loss broadband communication. However, it picks up interference from the world around it, such as FM radio signals. The Purdue technology suppresses those interfering signals to allow for improved communication between devices. Our technology uses the human body as a ‘wire’ and demonstrated greater than an order of magnitude lower-energy per communicated bit compared to the state-of-the-art design and about 100 times lower energy compared to today’s wireless BAN.


Key publication:

  • S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, G. Chang and S. Sen, "A 6.3pJ/b 30Mbps -30dB SIR-tolerant Broadband Interference-Robust Human Body Communication Transceiver using Time Domain Signal-Interference Separation," in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2018) - presenting world's lowest energy HBC transceiver[Online]
  • S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, G. Chang and S. Sen, "BodyWire: A 6.3pJ/b 30Mbps -30dB SIR-tolerant Broadband Interference-Robust Human Body Communication Transceiver using Time Domain Interference Rejection," in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC) - describing world's lowest energy HBC transceiver[Online]
  • S. Maity, N. Modak, D. Yang, S. Avlani, M. Nath, J. Danial, D. Das, P. Mehrotra, S. Sen, “A 415 nW Physically and Mathematically Secure Electro-Quasistatic HBC Node in 65nm CMOS for Authentication and Medical Applications,” in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2020) [Online]
  • B. Chatterjee, …, S. Sen, “A Context-aware Reconfigurable Transmitter with 2.24 pJ/bit, 802.15.6 NB-HBC and 4.93 pJ/bit, 400.9 MHz MedRadio Modes with 33.6% Transmit Efficiency,” in IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC 2020) [Online]

Security: Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attack

When ‘mathematically secure’ cryptographic cores are implemented on physical substrates they leak correlated information through unintended physical ‘side-channels’, such as power, electromagnetic(EM) radiation, acoustic, temperature etc. Side-channel attack (SCA) using electromagnetic (EM) radiation is a prominent tool to extract the secret key of an encryption device. This work investigates the root-cause behind the genesis of this EM leakage, presents the first ‘White-Box Model’ of EM Side-Channel Leakage and leverages it to develop an energy-efficient countermeasure using a signature attenuation hardware (SAH) to prevent such attacks on cryptographic ICs. More details can be found in the paper below:


Key publication:

  • D. Das , J. Danial, A. Golder, N. Modak, S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, D. Seo, M. Chang, A. Varna, H. Krishnamurthy, S. Mathew, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, “EM and Power SCA-resilient AES-256 in 65nm CMOS through >350x Current Domain Signature Attenuation,” in IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2020)
  • D. Das, J. Danial, A. Golder, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, "X-DeepSCA: Cross-Device Deep Learning Side Channel Atack," in ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC 2019) [Online ]
  • D. Das , J. Danial, A. Golder, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, “Deep Learning Side-Channel Attack Resilient AES-256 using Current Domain Signature Attenuation in 65nm CMOS,” in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2020) [Online]
  • D. Das, S. Maity, S. Nasir, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, "High Efficiency Power Side-Channel Attack Immunity using Noise Injection in Attenuated Signature Domain," in IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST 2017) - Best Student Paper Award [Online]
  • B. Chatterjee, D. Das and S. Sen, "RF-PUF: IoT Security Enhancement through Authentication of Wireless Nodes using In-situ Machine Learning," in IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST 2018) - Best Poster Award [Online]
  • D. Das, M. Nath, B. Chatterjee, S. Ghosh, and S. Sen, "STELLAR: A Generic EM Side-Channel Attack Protection through Ground-Up Root-cause Analysis," in IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST 2019) - Best Student Paper Award [Online]
  • B. Chatterjee, D. Das, S. Maity and S. Sen, "RF-PUF: Enhancing IoT Security through Authentication of Wireless Nodes using In-situ Machine Learning," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal (JIoT) [Online]

Time-Based High-Resolution Energy-Resolution Scalable Biosensing

In this work, we are developing the first monolithic CMOS radiation to digital converter, which consists of a floating-gate radiation sensor and a time-based resistance-to-digital-converter (RDC). The time-based RDC exhibits in-field resolution-energy scalability by controlling the total integrated time for measurement. Time-based sensing provides high-resolution (18 bit) by utilizing the availability of time, for extra low-frequency (ELF) application with ultra-low power (861nW). This research will enable wearable devices for real-time sensing of radiation exposure, for example in scenarios involving healthcare workers in a hospital setting during medical procedures (e.g. Chest CT-SCAN).


Key publication:

  • B. Chatterjee, Charilaos Mousoulis, Shovan Maity, Anurag Kumar, Sean Scott, Daniel Valentino, Dimitrios Peroulis and S. Sen, "A Wearable Real-time CMOS Dosimeter with Integrated Zero-bias Floating Gate Sensor and an 861nW 18-bit Energy-Resolution Scalable Time-based Radiation to Digital Converter," in IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2019) - Best Paper Award [ Online]
  • B. Chatterjee, Charilaos Mousoulis, DongHyun Seo, Anurag Kumar, S. Maity, Sean Scott, Daniel Valentino, Dimitrios Peroulis and Shreyas Sen, "A Wearable Real-time CMOS Dosimeter with Integrated Zero-bias Floating Gate Sensor and an 861nW 18-bit Energy-Resolution Scalable Time-based Radiation to Digital Converter,” in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC) - Invited journal version of CICC Best Paper [Online]