Short Bio

Berk Sunar is the Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Satin Fellow the Worcester Polytechnic Institute where is also as the founder of the Vernam Applied Cryptography and Cybersecurity Laboratory. He received his BSc degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University in 1995 and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Oregon State University in December 1998. After briefly working at Oregon State University as a Postdoctoral researcher Sunar joined Trust Inc. in Pasadena, CA as a Security Architect. In Fall 2000 Sunar has joined Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His recent research interests include Microarchitectural Security, AI for Security and Security for AI, Post-Quantum Cryptography, and Homomorphic Encryption.

Sunar received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2002. He organized the Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems Conference (CHES) in 2004, in Cambridge, Massachusetts and served on the CHES steering committee member until 2008. He served Program co-Chair of CHES 2005 along with Dr. J.R. Rao from IBM TJ Watson Research. He is also a founding steering committee member of the International Workshop of Applications of Finite Fields (WAIFI). Sunar served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers through 2010-2014. Sunar has served as a co-editor along with Profs. Christof Paar of Bochum-Ruhr University, Germany and Jean-Jacques Quisquater of Catholique University Lovain, Belgium on a Special Issue of the Journal of Cryptology on Hardware Security published in 2011. Sunar also served as an Associate Editor to the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and a member of the International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) professional societies.

Sunar published over 180 papers in select venues including the IEEE Transactions of Computers, IACR Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CES) Workshop (CES), IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), and the Usenix Workshop. His publications received over 12K citations with an H-index of 59. In 2006, Sunar published a new true hardware random number generator (TRNG) design with emphasis in simplicity that allows rigorous security analysis. The design has been highly cited and used in Industry, including in a Broadcom chip that ended up in the Asian distributions of the iPhone 7. In 2007, Sunar developed a method for side-channel based fingerprinting in integrated circuits that were manufactured in overseas (untrusted) foundries. This seminal work instigated further research in Hardware Trojans in IC manufacturing. For this work, Sunar received the IBM Research 2007 Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award. More recently in 2015, his team discovered a vulnerability in the Amazon Web Services cloud servers that allows an adversary in a co-located Virtual Machine to recover full RSA keys. This was followed by major vulnerability discoveries in Intel CPUs. Further his team discovered major vulnerabilities in hundreds of millions of Trusted Platform Modules in Intel processors (as firmware) and in STMicroelectronics' TPMs.