Basel Halak

About

Visiting Academic Posts

Visiting Professor (Secure IoT Technologies) at the Kazakh-British Technical University (2016-2017).
Visiting Scholar (Hardware Security) Technical University of Kaiserslautern on Technical University of Kaiserslautern (2017-Now).
Visiting Scholar (Hardware Security) at the University of Turin, Italy on Cryptographic systems and algorithms (2023-Now).

Visiting Scholar (Hardware Security) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway (2022-Now).

International Conferences Organisation

Organising Committee Member (European Liaison) of IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), United
Chair of the IEEE International Verification and Security Workshop (IVSW).
Program Theme Chair of the 11th IEEE European workshops on Microelectronics
Technical Program Committee member IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST).
Technical Program Committee member IEEE Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE)
Technical Program Committee member IEEE Design, Automation Conference (DAC).
Technical Program Committee member of Microprocessor/SoC Test and Verification Workshop, United States
Technical program committee member of the international Microelectronics Olympiad,
Technical Program Committee Member of the IEEE International Conferences on Computer and Computational Sciences,
Technical Program Committee Member of IEEE Asia and South Pacific Design Automation

Advisory Roles

External Examiner of the Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Manchester (2023-2027).
External Examiner of the Engineering Faculty at University of the West of England (2019-2022).
PhD Examiner in UK and international universities (e.g. Waterloo University, Canada, Newcastle University, UK).
Member of Synopsys Curricula Advisory Board, United States.
Member of the Hardware Security Working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Reviewer of numerous journals including IEEE Transections on Computers, IEEE Transactions on VLSI, IEEE Transection on Circuits and Systems TCAS I, IEEE Transections on VLSI, IEEE Transection on Circuits and Systems TCAS II, Microelectronics

Invited Talks

Invited Speaker Newcastle University, CMOS Aging Causes, Effects and Mitigations techniques, 2016.
Invited Speaker, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan Physically Unclonable Technologies for IoT Security Applications, 2017.
Invited Speaker, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, On the Personalities of Electronics Systems and their Security Applications, 2018.
Embedded Tutorial, IEEE International Verification and Security Workshop (IVSW), Spain, Physically Unclonable Functions: Design Principles, Applications and Outstanding Challenges, 2018.
Invited Speaker, Newcastle University, On the Hardware Security of Resources Constrained Systems, 2018.
Invited Seminar, Intel Corporation, United States, Hardware-Based security Solutions of the Internet of Things, 2018.
Invited Seminar, Intel Corporation, United States, Physically Unclonable Functions: Applications and Outstanding Challenges, 2018.
Invited Seminar, Queen University in Belfast, Hardware-Based security Solutions of the Internet of Things, 2018.
Invited Speaker, University of Liverpool, Hardware-Based security Solutions of the Internet of Things, 2018.
Invited Speaker, University of York, On the Hardware Security of Resources Constrained Systems, 2019.
Invited Speaker, The Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), Securing Hardware Supply Chain with an Unforgeable Root of Trust, University of Sussex, 2020
Invited Speaker Hardware Supply Chain Security: Threats and Defences, Synopsys Armenia Educational Department, Armenia, March 2020.
Invited Speaker, Hardware-based Security Solutions for the Internet of Things, 25th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, Beijing, China, 2020.
Invited Speaker Hardware Trojan Detection and Mitigation Techniques: Threats and Defences, Synopsys Armenia Educational Department, Armenia, March 2021.
Invited Speaker, Physically Unclonable Functions, Design Principles, and Outstanding Research Challenges. AVT-337 Research Workshop on Anti-tamper protective systems for NATO operations, November 2021.
Invited Speaker, Physically Unclonable Functions Armenia Educational Department, Armenia, March 2022.
Invited Speaker, Hardware Supply Chain Security Threat Analysis, and emerging countermeasures. Third-Party & Supply Chain Cyber Security, Summit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2022.
Invited Speaker, Hardware Supply Chain Security Risk Assessment and Defences Techniques. Supply Chain Risk and Resilience Forum - Berlin 2023.
Invited Speaker, Machine Learning For Hardware Security Armenia Educational Department, Armenia, March 2023
Invited Speaker, Chip Security: Why should we care? South West Cyber Cluster, United Kingdom, September, 2024

Public Engagement

Interview with Reuters on the hardware supply chain security, following pagers explosion incidents in the Middle East (2024). URL: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/analyst-on-how-a-detonator-could-theoretically-fit-in-a-pager/video/1452a2e893ee71a006f35460ce8427e0
Article on the Hidden threats in our electronic supply chain (2024). URL: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-09-23/The-hidden-threats-in-our-electronic-supply-chain-1x7ZuS9CnJu/p.html
A blog on how to design secure electronics for space applications (2024). URL: https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/how-do-we-ensure-the-security-of-space-applications
A blog by armComunity on hardware supply chain security (2022)
URL: https://community.arm.com/developer/research/b/articles/posts/addressing-the-hardware-supply-chain-security-challenge
A case study on my hardware Security Research , published by the Royal Academy of Engineering(2020). URL: https://raeng.org.uk/programmes-and-prizes/programmes/meet-the-researchers/dr-basel-halak
Radio interview on TBS eFM, Seoul, South Korea New Authentication Methods (2020) URL: http://www.podbbang.com/ch/10101
BBC Article on New Authentication Methods: Amazon One: Palm scanner launched for 'secure' payments (2020). URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54337984
Global Media coverage of the research findings of energy consumption of asymmetric crypto systems(2021-2023).

Editorship

Associate Editor of IEEE Access
Editor of IET Circuit, Devices and System Special Issue on Microelectronics Education, United Kingdom.
Editor of MPDI Micromachines, Special Issue on Hardware Supply Chain.

Research

Research groups

Member of:

Research interests

Hardware Security
Applied Cryptography
Digital Systems Design

Research projects

Completed projects

SECUR

Researchers:

Doctor Basel Halak

Sponsor: Royal Academy of Engineering

Securing Hardware Supply Chain With an Unforgeable Root of Trust

Researchers:

Doctor Basel Halak

Sponsor: Royal Academy of Engineering

Security of Deep Learning Accelerator in Heterogeneous Edge Computing Devices (RISC-V based)

Researchers:

Doctor Basel Halak

Publications

110 publications

Page 1 of 11

TampML: tampering attack detection and malicious nodes localization in NoC-based MPSoC

Haoyu Wang & Basel Halak, 2024, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 1-12

DOI: 10.1109/TETC.2024.3434663

Type: article

GNS: Graph-based Network-on-Chip Shield for Early Defense Against Malicious Nodes in MPSoC

Haoyu Wang, Jianjie Ren, Basel Halak & Ahmad Atamli, 2024, IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems, 14(3), 483-494

DOI: 10.1109/jetcas.2024.3438435

Type: article

DL2Fence: integrating deep learning and frame fusion for enhanced detection and localization of refined denial-of-service in large-scale NoCs

Haoyu Wang, Basel Halak, Jianjie Ren & Ahmad Atamli, 2024

Type: conference

A method for swift selection of appropriate approximate multipliers for CNN hardware accelerators

Peiyao Sun, Haosen Yu, Basel Halak & Tomasz Kazmierski, 2024

Type: conference

Tamper resistant design of convolutional neural network hardware accelerator

Haosen Yu, Peiyao Sun, Basel Halak, Karthik Shanthakumar & Tomasz Kazmierski, 2024

DOI: 10.1109/AsianHOST59942.2023.10409319

Type: conference

Evaluation of performance, energy, and computation costs of quantum-attack resilient encryption algorithms for embedded devices

Basel Halak, Thomas Gibson, Millicent Henley, Cristin-Bianca Botea, Benjamin Heath & Sayedur Khan, 2024, IEEE Access, 12, 8791-8805

DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3350775

Type: article

ZeKi: A zero-knowledge dynamic logic locking implementation with resilience to multiple attacks

Yue Zhang, Basel Halak & Haoyu Wang, 2024

DOI: 10.1109/SOCC62300.2024.10737800

Type: conference

A methodology for cybersecurity risk assessment in supply chains

Betul Gokkaya, Leonardo Aniello, Erisa Karafili & Basel Halak, 2023

Type: conference

A PUF based on the non-linearity of memristors

Callum Aitchison, Basel Halak, Alex Serb & Themis Prodromakis, 2023

DOI: 10.1109/CSR57506.2023.10224980

Type: conference

A memristor fingerprinting and characterisation methodology for hardware security

Callum Aitchison, Basel Halak, Alex Serb & Themis Prodromakis, 2023, Scientific Reports, 13(1), 9392

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-33051-z

Type: article

Teaching

Teaching at the University of Southampton

Digital Design

I have extensive teaching experience of on digital design principles, from concept to silicon implementation. My expertise includes Hardware Description Languages (VHDL and System Verilog), as well as hands-on experience of FPGA and ASIC design flows with industry-standard EDA design tools, including Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, and Vivado.

Secure Hardware Design

I lead this master-level module, it cover security and trust from hardware perspectives’ also discusses the vulnerabilities of modern Systems on Chip design flow and how these can become legitimate security threats such as hardware trojans and physical attacks.

Cryptography

I lead this master-level module, it covers the mathematics, techniques, and applications of modern cryptography, it also covers the history of code making and code breaking and draw lessons for the future from the mistakes and successes of the past.

International Teaching Activities

ELEC2221 Digital Systems and Signal Processing at University of Southampton Malaysia Campus

I have taught the digital design part on this second year course, it introduces techniques of designing robust, testable sequential digital systems, writing and debugging synthesisable modules in a hardware description language (System Verilog) and verifying the functionality of those modules by simulation. It provides practical experience in the design and diagnosis of sequential digital systems.

Embedded Systems Design and IoT Technologies: Kazakh-British Technical University

I led this master-level module, it covers the principles of Embedded Systems Design with particular focus on relevant computer architectures such as those by ARM and MIPS.

Introduction on Embedded Systems Security: University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

I led this master-level module, it covers the principles of designing secure embedded systems with reference to new emerging industrial design framework such as ARM PSA and gives detailed information on emerging security primitives such as physically unclonable functions, it also covers a number of related topics including Hardware Trojan and IC-counterfeit.

Hardware-based Security Solutions for the Internet of Things: IEEE Tutorial at Khalifa University, UAE

This tutorial discusses the design challenges of secure IoT systems and how to use hardware security to tackle those challenges, it also explains explain the design principles of Physically Unclonable Functions.

External roles and responsibilities

Name: PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Role: Participant

Year: 2011 - 2022

Biography

Dr Basel Halak an Associate Professor of secure electronics and the Director of the Cyber Security Academy with the University of Southampton. He is also leading European Masters in Embedded Computing Systems (EMECS) . Dr Halak is a visiting scholar at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern ,Norwegian University of Science and Technology , and Polytechnic di Torino. He previously served as a visiting professor at the Kazakh-British Technical University 2017.

Dr. Halak’s expertise spans Digital Systems Design, Hardware Security and Applied Cryptography. and he has authored over 100-refereed conference and journal papers, and seven books, including the first textbook on Physically Unclonable Functions, and the first book on Hardware Supply Chain Security. Beyond academia, Dr. Halak has collaborated extensively with industry such as ARM, Arqit, Schneider Electric, and Ericsson.

Dr Halak is the recipient of the industrial fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the National Teaching Fellowship awarded by the Advance Higher Education(HE) Academy . He actively contributes to the global research community as a member of technical program committees for leading conferences such as HOST, IEEE DATE, IEEE DAC, IVSW, ICCCA, ICCCS, MTV and EWME. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE access and a Guest Editor of the IET circuit devices and system journal.

As of November 2024, he has supervised to completion 15 PhD students and 7 post-doctoral scholars.

Prizes

National Teaching Fellow Advance(HE) Higher Education (2020)
Industrial Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering (2019)
The Vice-Chancellor Teaching Award (2016)
National Teaching Fellow Advance(HE) Higher Education United Kingdom (2020)
Industrial Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering (2019)
The Vice-Chancellor Teaching Award (2016)
National Teaching Fellow Advance(HE) Higher Education United Kingdom (2020)
Industrial Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering (2019)
The Vice-Chancellor Teaching Award (2016)
Industrial Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering (2019)
National Teaching Fellow Advance(HE) Higher Education United Kingdom (2020)
The Vice-Chancellor Teaching Award (2016)