ECE's Koushanfar earns DARPA Young Faculty Award
 Farinaz Koushanfar, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering (ECE), is the recipient of a prestigious Young Faculty Award (YFA) from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development agency for the U.S. Department of Defense.
The YFA was awarded to only 24 researchers in the core technology areas covered by the DARPA Microsystems Technology Office, including electronics, micro-electro-mechanical systems, photonics, nanotechnology (including nano-bio), architecture and algorithms.
The YFA is awarded to researchers whose work is leading to advances in technologies and systems of strategic importance. Koushanfar is researching novel ways to ensure security of embedded systems and protection of intellectual property.
Today, most hardware intellectual property (IP) is fabricated offshore because of lower costs.
Koushanfar said, "What is often unnoticed is that hardware piracy is economically much larger than the well-known and well-addressed software piracy."
Her research protects hardware IP against piracy using techniques such as structural characterization of manufacturing variability, hardware locking and remote disabling.
"By careful integration of inherent and unique manufacturing variability into functionality at the design phase, we can generate locks for each integrated circuit," she said. "The fabrication house would not be able to operate the copies unless they request the proper keys from us. The techniques are extendable to remote disabling and usage metering."
Koushanfar joined Rice in July 2006 after earning advanced degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and in statistics from the University of California-Berkeley. She also has master's degree from UCLA and a bachelor's from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, both in electrical engineering.
Koushanfar has received many awards and honors as a graduate student, including an Intel Open Collaborative Research fellowship, a NSF graduate student fellowship, a best paper award at Mobicom and the Women4Change student leadership award at UCLA.
Behnaam Aazhang, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor and chair of ECE, said, "We have been very fortunate. We worked hard to recruit Farinaz. She is an outstanding addition to our department."
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