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News

Mar/2026 - PhD students have received fellowships from Boeing and private donors. Congrats to Kevin and Lucas!
Mar/2026 - Our paper on logic reverse engineering will appear in CHES.
Jan/2026 - Our paper describing a security-oriented chip design flow will appear in TCAD.
Nov/2025 - Our industry-supported project on a UVM framework for emulation has been funded.
Oct/2025 - Our UKRI collaboration with Queen's University Belfast has been funded.
Sep/2025 - Our paper on secure layout synthesis appears on IEEE TCAD.
Aug/2025 - Zain Ul Abideen started his professorship at Idaho! Congrats!
Jun/2025 - Felipe Almeida defended his PhD. Congrats! Link to the full thesis here.
May/2025 - I will be teaching a brand new course on Hardware Verification starting in the Fall.
Jan/2025 - We have a new book out on FPGA-like obfuscation. Link here.
Oct/2024 - Mohammad Eslami has succesfully defended his PhD. Link to the full text here.
Sep/2024 - Our paper describing a hardware trojan contest will appear in TCHES.
Jul/2024 - Our paper on PQC HW Trojans appear on Asia CCS. Coverage here.
Jun/2024 - Our paper on FPGA-inspired obfuscation appears on ACM Computing Surveys.
Mar/2024 - NSF has funded our US-EE-UA project on secure crypto hardware accelerators.
Jan/2024 - Zain Ul Abideen has succesfully defended his PhD. Link to the full text here.

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Publications

Check my Scholar profile or my Research Gate profile A list of defended theses is also available here.

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Grants

My research has been sponsored by many funding agencies. Here is a list of ongoing (green) and finished projects.

IND UVM framework for emulation
UKRI SCA and countermeasures for HQC post-quantum cryptography
NSF EAGER: Hardware-Efficient Realization of UA Cryptographic Standards
EC SMART4ALL - Internal PAE
TalTech Rector's Fund
ETAg Mobilitas Pluss - ERC support
EC H2020 Twinning - SAFEST
EC/ITA Professorship linked to the IT Academy programme
DARPA CRAFT
DARPA Obfuscated Manufacturing for GPS (OMG)
IARPA RAVEN
NSF Neuromorphic Hardware

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Awards and Honors

• TalTech School of IT Research Article of the Year 2023
• TalTech School of IT "Tanukirjaga tunnustatu" - Commendation for establishing the Centre for HW Security
• HeLLo: CTF 2022 1st place award
• TalTech School of IT Researcher of the Year 2022
• DDECS 2022 Best paper award
• ISPD 2022 3rd place, contest in Security Closure of Physical Layouts
• DATE 2022 Best paper nomination, IP category
• TalTech School of IT Research Article of the Year 2020
• HOST 2020 Best paper nomination
• ICCAD 2016 1st place, 2016 ICCAD contest in Pattern Classification

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Courses

• 18-768 Hardware Security (Fall 2026) - SEE CANVAS FOR COURSE MATERIAL
• 18-632 Hardware Security (Spring 2026) - SEE CANVAS FOR COURSE MATERIAL
• 18-768 Hardware Verification (Fall 2025)
• 18-632 Hardware Security (Spring 2025)
• IAS0630 Hardware Security (Fall 2023)
• IAS0630 Hardware Security (Fall 2022)
• IAS0635 Hardware Security (Fall 2021)

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Datasets and reference designs

Some of the stuff I have worked on over the years

• Chip design flow Zero-overhead security closure, available on GitHub
• SRAM PUF data SRAM PUF measurement data, available on GitHub
• ASAP7 ref design Reference design for the ISPD'23 contest, GitHub
• saber-chip SABER core tapeout, available on GitHub
• Chip-to-chip RSA auth Chip to chip authentication protocol based on RSA, available on GitHub
• T6507lp processor Code available on opencores
• Large mul lib GitHub repo

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Advising and mentoring

• PhD@CMU Lucas Franck, from August 2025.
• PhD@CMU Kevin Xu, from June 2025.
• Postdoc@TalTech Mohammad Eslami, since October 2024.
Postdoc@CMU Zain Ul Abideen, since April 2024.
• PhD@CMU Carlos Gewehr, since August 2024.

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Former students/postdocs

• Postdoc Zain Ul Abideen, April 2024 to July 2025.
• PhD Felipe Almeida, August 2019 to June 2025.
• PhD Mohammad Eslami, October 2020 to October 2024.
• PhD Zain Ul Abideen, March 2020 to January 2024.
• Postdoc Levent Aksoy, October 2020 to February 2024.
• PhD Malik Imran, November 2019 to November 2023.
• Postdoc Muayad Aljafar, March 2021 to July 2023.
• Postdoc Sumathi Gokulanathan, August 2022 to June 2023.
• PhD Tiago Perez, January 2020 to February 2023.
• MSc Giorgi Basiashvili, September 2021 to June 2022.
• Postdoc Mahdieh Grailoo, October 2020 to Feb 2022.
• Postdoc Pablo Vaz, July 2020 to November 2020.

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Contact

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