So Your SoC Has Trust Issues? That May Be Good for Humanity.

Speaker: Prof. Todd Austin

Affiliation: University of Michigan, US

Abstract:

Modern SoCs have trust issues—and for good reason. Their threat models increasingly assume compromised software, untrusted hardware, exposed interconnects, and attackers exploiting both vulnerabilities and side channels. Chiplets raise the stakes further by forcing us to question even fabrication and component provenance.

The answer is not to restore trust, but to design around its absence. That means combining our strongest tools: cryptography to protect data, formal verification to establish critical guarantees, and minimal hardware-only trusted computing bases. I will illustrate this approach with Mojo-V, a RISC-V project developing a minimal, formally verified hardware TCB for secure computation.

There may also be a broader lesson. The same principles used to secure SoCs against powerful adversaries may help preserve human agency in a world of superintelligent AI: trust less, verify more, isolate what matters, and protect everything else with cryptography.

Bio: Todd Austin is the S. Jack Hu Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research spans computer architecture, hardware security, dependable systems, and AI hardware. An IEEE Fellow, he is widely recognized for contributions to the performance, security, and reliability of modern computing systems.