Institute of Informatics

The University of Freiburg, founded in 1457, offers undergraduate and graduate studies as well as professorial qualification in all important disciplines today: the humanities, natural and engineering sciences, medicine, law, and theology. With its 25.000 students, the University provides an ideal environment for innovative interdisciplinary studies.

Through the Institute of Informatics, the University develops methods and procedures to ensure the correctness, reliability, and robustness of circuits and systems covering initial design stages through manufacturing. The course of Verification of Digital Systems gives priority to the safety and security of the functioning of modern products based on microelectronic components. Technologies for formal verification are taught like binary decision diagrams, SAT solvers, and-inverter graphs and approaches based on symbolic methods for checking the equivalence of combinational and sequential circuits as well as for model checking different classes of properties. Then, another course is provided called Hardware Security and Trust through hardware components manipulation that concludes to security functions covering subjects concerning system integrity, unauthorized access to protected data, and intellectual property. Basics on cryptography, authentication, secret sharing, VLSI design, test, and verification introduce hardware security and trust covering the topics of physical and invasive attacks, side-channel attacks, PUFs, hardware-based true random number generators, watermarking of Intellectual Property (IP) blocks, FPGA security, prevention of piracy, access control, hardware Trojan detection.

Contact: Christoph Scholl, Professor ( scholl [at] informatik.uni-freiburg.de )