Engineering's Himanshu Thapliyal Receives NSF CAREER Award

Himanshu Thapliyal, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Kentucky, has received a prestigious five-year, $568,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project titled, “CAREER: Utilizing Principles of Energy Recovery Computing for Low-Energy and DPA-Resistant IoT Devices.”

The CAREER Award is given in support of faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Funds from the award will allow Thapliyal to develop circuit design techniques for energy-recovery circuits and a library of such design cells to facilitate low-power implementation of block cipher for mobile internet of things (IoT) devices, where reducing power consumption is critical. The design challenge is to produce low-energy, lightweight and secure devices, which are also resistant against malicious attacks that use power consumption traces to extract private or sensitive information. 

This project will provide a set of energy recovery (ER) principles for low-energy and differential power analysis (DPA)-resistant IoT devices. The research objectives are: to investigate information leakage in ER circuits and propose mitigation methodologies; to investigate and develop a low-energy and DPA-resistant ER standard cell library and semi-custom design flow for lightweight cryptographic circuits; to investigate and develop power clock generation and distribution, and silicon prototyping to evaluate energy dissipation and the DPA-resistance of ER-based crypto circuits.

Outcomes and results from this project should make a strong case for industry adoption of ER computing for the design of low-energy and secure IoT devices. Another integral goal of this project is to broaden graduate, undergraduate and minority participation in cyber and hardware security research and education by developing new courses in hardware security. Internships will be offered to Appalachian high-school students and historically underrepresented minorities, and first-generation students.

Thapliyal is also an Endowed Robley D. Evans Faculty Fellow and co-director of Cybersecurity Certificate Program at UK. He earned his doctoral degree from the University of South Florida. Thapliyal joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UK in 2014. He has more than 100 publications and more than 3,100 citations with H-index=35 as per Google Scholar.