"ECE Faculty Develops Inventive Cybersecurity Technology, Wins Best Paper at International Conference"
Mohamed "Aly" El-Hadedy, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, was a member of a team whose innovative cybersecurity solution won Best Paper at the 2022 IEEE International System-on-Chip (SoC) Conference (IEEE SOCC). At the conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, researchers from around the world presented their findings on the SoC technology. Laptops, smartphones, autonomous vehicles, and many other technologies use SoC. It is anticipated that by 2030, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices will exceed 25 billion, posing a significant cybersecurity threat. In response, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a global competition to design a lightweight cryptographic solution for protecting IoT devices. Aly and his colleagues released "RECO-HCON: A High-Throughput Reconfigurable Compact ASCON Processor for Trusted IoT," suggesting a solution to the issue of inadequate cybersecurity in high-performance computing clusters connected to the same network or the Internet. Their proposed technique includes the secure exchange of data while drastically reducing processing power. Aly, colleagues from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and academics from Changhai Jiao Tong University developed a crypto-processor that is between 100 million and one billion times smaller than the ordinary smartphone. The processor also consumes a trivial amount of power. This article continues to discuss the inventive cybersecurity solution proposed by the team.