Speaker: Teju Das, Rochester Institute of Technology
Abstract
Research on hardware Trojans, including detection methods, has largely focused on digital circuits and behavior observable in the digital domain. Analog and mixed-signal circuitry poses a different problem: continuous-valued behavior, shared infrastructure, and process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) margins can conceal structured malicious activity without producing a conventional specification failure. Although prior work has exploited analog effects in hardware attacks, analog-native and cross-domain Trojans remain comparatively underexplored.
The talk traces how transistor-level analog mechanisms can produce system-level security consequences. Circuit studies demonstrate an all-analog, supply-triggered Trojan that can manipulate ECG signals before digitization and a covert channel that modulates pre-existing supply harmonics. Two silicon-validated studies in a commercial 55-nm CMOS process then expose complementary paths across the analog–digital boundary. One attack originates in the analog supply network, encodes deterministic patterns within an ADC’s effective noise envelope, and activates digital payloads. The other uses a digitally controlled analog payload to modulate input-referred offset and exfiltrate information through a nominally unidirectional sensor input.
Together, these studies show that functional and parametric compliance alone cannot rule out adversarial use of analog behavior. They motivate treating analog front ends, power networks, data converters, and I/O as first-class security surfaces, and developing defenses that combine security-focused analog validation, PVT-aware interpretation, and complementary off-chip and on-chip monitoring of shared infrastructure and analog–digital interfaces.
Bio
Tejasvi (Teju) Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Microelectronic Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology and Director of the RF/Analog/Mixed-Signal Laboratory (RAMLab). Before joining academia, he spent 15 years in the semiconductor industry, where he led technology and product development for high-volume analog and mixed-signal ICs in sensing and audio applications, with cumulative shipments exceeding 600 million units. He has been granted more than 180 U.S. and international patents. He received his Ph.D. in Microsystems Engineering from RIT.
His primary research area is analog and RF IC design, with a focus on analog-domain hardware security, biosensing, and device–circuit–network co-design for neuromorphic computing. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and recognized with two IEEE best-paper awards. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, serves on the program committee of IEEE ISCAS, and is Vice Program Chair of the IEEE Microelectronics Design & Test Symposium (MDTS).
Faculty Host: John Kymissis, Mingoo Seok