Integrating Emerging Cryptographic Engineering Research and Security Education

Unlike traditional embedded systems such as secure smart cards, emerging secure deeplyembedded systems, e.g., implantable and wearable medical devices, have larger “attack surface”. A security breach in such systems which are embedded deeply in human bodies or objects would be life-threatening, for which adopting traditional solutions might not be practical due to tight constraints of these often-battery-powered systems. Unfortunately, although emerging cryptographic engineering research mechanisms have started solving this critical problem, university education (at both graduate and undergraduate level) lags comparably. One of the pivotal reasons for such a lag is the multi-disciplinary nature of the emerging security bottlenecks (mathematics, engineering, science, and medicine, to name a few). Based on the aforementioned motivation, in this paper, we present an effective research and education integration strategy to overcome this issue at Rochester Institute of Technology. Moreover, we present the results of more than one year implementation of the presented strategy at graduatelevel through “side-channel analysis attacks” case studies. The results of the presented work show the success of the presented methodology while pinpointing the challenges encountered compared to traditional embedded system security research/teaching integration.