Mehran Mozaffari Kermani - Featured Faculty 2014

Unlike traditional embedded systems, nowadays, emerging computing systems are embedded in every aspect of human lives. These deeply-embedded computing systems often perform extremely sensitive tasks, and in some cases, such as health-care IT, these are life-saving. Thus, in addition to the security threats to traditional embedded systems, emerging deeply-embedded computing systems exhibit a larger attack surface, prone to more serious or life-threatening malicious attacks. As such, new trends for providing security for deeply-embedded systems are emerging; many of which abandoning use of cryptographic computations or make use of lightweight crypto-systems, feasible for these computing platforms.

Mehran Mozaffari Kermani works concurrently on three research topics. Part of his research group works on cryptographic engineering. In short, the research group is involved in the design, implementation, and optimization of crypto-systems in embedded hardware and software. In addition, the group actively works on emerging topics in side-channel analysis attacks and countermeasures. His research group also conducts research on emerging areas in embedded systems security, applicable to constrained, sensitive nodes in different applications ranging from industrial networks to implantable and wearable medical devices deeply embedded in human body. Moreover, the research group is actively involved in providing reliability approaches for vulnerable implementations of crypto-systems to natural/malicious faults. Currently, he is serving as an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems and the lead Guest Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Moreover, he has served as the lead Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing.

Mehran Mozaffari Kermani is working very closely with the Computer Engineering Department and especially with Reza Azarderakhsh, one of the well-known researchers in Cryptographic Engineering. Specifically, he works with Reza Azarderakhsh on editing well-known IEEE Transactions journals, publishing research articles on cryptography and embedded systems security, supervising graduate students, and attracting external fund. This close collaboration across departments in a research area that is of strategic significance for RIT as well as for society has been (and is expected to be) a pivotal plan for both Mehran and Reza.

To learn more about Mozaffari Kermani's work, you can visit: http://people.rit.edu/~mmkeme/