Dr. Shayan (Sean/Sansón) Taheri’s research projects, as a former professor, were determined to be outstanding and unique in the advancement of Cybersecurity as basis for long-term partnership and collaboration among academia, industry, government, and private sectors. The mission of them was set to: (1) directly support research needs and demands of partners in a cost-effective manner with efficient and connected resources and maximized cooperation; and (2) augment the educational experience for a diverse set of skilled and talented graduate- and undergraduate-level researchers and students. The research efforts were directed to advance knowledge and technologies in the novel areas and warrant commercial relevance of the research with prompt and impressive technology transfer and establishing spin-off firms. Association with these projects provided excellent expertise and knowledge in all aspects of Cybersecurity with great connections to hardware, software, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), medical science and healthcare system, computer vision, quantum computing, data science, forensic science, networking, mobile computing, big data, applied cryptography, social sciences, criminal justice, law, and more.

 



With the emergence of information technology and its critical and indispensable role in our daily lives and the increasing complexity of networked computing systems, the risk of cyber-attacks is larger today than ever before that makes modern systems vulnerable to various attacks against their resources, infrastructure, and functioning. While the reasons for such attacks may be tied to complex sociological issues, the defense solutions to confront them should be continuously studied for all system layers, i.e., Physics and Material, Nano-electronic Device, Nano-electronic Device-Level Circuit, Gate-Level Circuit and Register Transfer Level (RTL), Micro-architecture, Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), Operating System and Virtual Machine, Programming Language, Algorithm, and Application. While there are abundant works on security of traditional software elements in computing systems, the research efforts on the security of hardware components as well as the intelligent hardware-software elements are insufficient, so the scientific community still lacks adequate and reliable knowledge about their principles, existing and emerging threats, and countermeasures for making the systems secure and protected.

 

The complexity of the design, fabrication, and distribution of electronics has caused a shift throughout the industry toward a global business model, thereby creating new sources of system vulnerabilities. In such a model, untrusted entities participate either directly or indirectly in all phases in the life of an electronic device or Integrated Circuit (IC). Due to this globalization, hardware underlying information systems have become increasingly targets of various malicious and stealthy attacks. To ensure the security of our critical infrastructure, the use of trusted hardware is absolutely necessary. On the other side, several security issues have been raised in critical infrastructures due to the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in real-world applications (e.g., driver-less cars, biometric/speech recognition system, and healthcare system) thanks to its provision of superior performance in identification and cognitive tasks. Besides several offenses on “normal” AI systems, the methods from AI can be leveraged by adversaries to perform intelligent malicious activities, leading to detrimental social, physical, and economic impacts. As a result, it is extremely challenging and timely mission for academic, industrial, and governmental institutions to comprehensively study and analyze the security aspects of hardware components and intelligent hardware-software elements in computing systems. Motivated by the above matters, Dr. Taheri’s research projects, as a former professor, included all directions of “Hardware Security” (refer to its Book 1 and Book 2) and “Security Aspects of Artificial Intelligence” (refer to its Book 1 and Book 2), aiming to make the next generation of computing systems more trustworthy. A number of these directions are mentioned in the following:

 


The academic contributions of the projects were determined to be development of scientific elements of Cybersecurity along with related innovative technologies that transform the design, test, and security assessment of large and small enterprises as well as critical applications, such as healthcare systems, power grid systems, financial systems, military systems, transportation systems, etc. They included educational items with various modules, such as seminar series, tutorials, short courses, educational tools and software, and lecture videos. These research efforts provided unique learning opportunities for graduate, undergraduate, and even high school students along with certain entities from enterprises. There were also specific plans for underrepresented trainees.

Dr. Shayan (Sean/Sansón) Taheri, as a former professor, actively sought excellent graduate and undergraduate students with technical and analytical skills for conducting state-of-the-art research in the areas of interests. Students in the Master of Science and the Bachelor of Science programs with majors in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science and with expertise and experience in successful research were encouraged to contact for consideration. The prospective members were required to have a demonstrable and solid background in a number of the following cases:

 

 

Interested students who wanted to be involved in the projects were asked to send a copy of their resumes along with any other supporting document(s), all consolidated into a single Portable Document Format (PDF) file. They were needed to include the word "Prospective" in the email subject line when sending their materials to Dr. Taheri's email address.


Current Assistants.


Alumni: