components. In hardware, you can use a
all. So I’ll give you a simple idea about
tion to the attacks, obviously the major
Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) or
that. An attack like somebody is trying to
focus of these research works is coming
Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), and there
break in. So the idea of the side channel
up with how to make the system safer
are different ways of achieving it. There
attack is to break in and find the secret
against these attacks. They are called
are different projects where we are work-
key that is used by a cryptosystem of
counter measures.
ing on different aspects of the accelera-
a device. So in encryption, if you want
tion. There are projects where we worked
find the secret key you can do brute
And Sir about your publications?
on how to improve the algorithm and to
force attacks and that’s the simple way
You can find them on my homepage as
make it faster by using GPU. We can put
of doing it. But if you have a 32bit key,
there is a list of about 100 of them.
it parallel and make it faster. And there
then you have to try for 232 combina-
are places where we use FPGA to make
tions, and it is not possible because it
computation faster. So I am interested in
takes too long time. So that’s the normal
all of them and we are working on differ-
way. But side channel is a different way
ent projects. I have done around 25 to 30
of breaking. Instead of doing brute-force,
projects on High-Performance Computing
we take some measurements of a side-
with students both undergraduate and
channel and then we do some computa-
postgraduate level.
tion. So when the computation is happening, there are other things like power
So sir, what did we get from
those projects for our departments?
Yeah, we got something like for instance
I hope you know that we got a GPU
Research Center from NVIDIA. It is a good
addition to ESCAL. What this means is
that we had to do a lot of high performance computing research and also we
had to use GPU for such works. We submitted a proposal for this lab to NVIDIA.
We had to tell them what we have done,
and we had to present publications we
made and presentations we have done
on those things. We had to put them all
and make a proposal. So they go through
it and decide whether to give the status
to our University. So to achieve it, we had
dissipation happens, or time consumed.
If you take an algorithm or a program,
depending on the data you put, it takes
different amount of time. Similarly, it will
take different amount of energy, power
consumption and all. So by measuring
that information such as power dissipation, can I predict the key? Can I break it?
That’s the idea of the side channel attack.
So the interest is, not to actually break
into a system, but to see whether there
are problems in a system so that you can
come up with a better system. Again we
have done about 810 projects up to now
under this topic.
Right now there is a final year project,
and it is called “Power Analysis Attack.”
to do a reasonable amount of work.
So there you measure the power con-
Also, for the High Performance
controller is doing the encryption. Then
Computing research, we got a high performance server. It has a 32 core processor and 256GB memory. So we can use
it to do parallel computing on CPU, and
there were some projects we did in par-
sumption of a system when the microby just analyzing the power consumption,
we can figure out which key is used in
the encryption. The interesting thing is
that by using power measurement and
the high-performance computing tech-
allel computing using that server.
niques, we can break a single encryption
Any other recent research?
10 minutes. We also have shown that we
One other research is “Side Channel
Attacks”. It will take a while to explain
14
Gauge Newsletter
of 128bits key AES algorithm in about
can break a new cipher that is popular
among embedded devices known as
Speck in a small amount of time. In addi-
University of Peradeniya
So that’s all regarding research.
And I have three more questions. Sir, there is a trend
towards Software Engineering.
So what do you think why
students are less interested
towards Embedded systems?
Because of the industry trend in Sri
Lanka, right? For the last 5 to 6 years,
we are noticing this. When the students
are in their 3rd year, they are very much
interested in hardware and embedded
systems. They are interested in doing
embedded projects and some electronic
projects, digital design projects. But
when they go for training, they realize that most of them have to do what
is done in the industry. It is how you
perceive. However, the industry trend is
changing towards embedded systems
and hardware, and such companies are
coming to Sri Lanka. I see it as a good
trend, particularly for our graduates.
Any message that you want to
give to the students?
Have the right attitude. You can learn
anything else, everything you can learn
if you have the right attitude. Believe in
you, work hard and you can achieve anything you dream of.
So sir, the final question. After
you had finished your Ph.D., you
came back here to teach. So my
question is why did you choose
Peradeniya again?
So why lecturing in Peradeniya? That’s
really an interesting question. Even I ask