Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Hardware Security, Physically Unclonable Functions, Acoustic Side Channel Attacks
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur. My research focuses on hardware security, physically unclonable functions (PUFs), acoustic side-channel attacks, approximate computing, and UAV security. I lead the Secure Embedded and Smart Things Laboratory (SETTLOR) at the C3I Center of IIT Kanpur.
The general focus of my SETTLOR research group is on hardware and embedded system security, addressing challenges posed by emerging technologies. Our key research areas include Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks, Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), Approximate Computing, Near Field and Far-Field EM Side Channel Attacks, UAV Security, Screen Reading TEMPEST Attacks, Network-on-Chip (NoC) security, Bio-Chip Security and Post-Quantum Cryptography.
I am looking for self-motivated students with strong academic background to join our group and work on exciting projects related to hardware security, side-channel attacks, PUFs, approximate computing, and IoT security. Interested students can email their CV with a short description about their research interests.
Send your CVHardware fingerprinting for device authentication and cryptographic key generation.
Securing unmanned aerial vehicles against cyber-physical attacks and intrusion.
Exploiting acoustic emanations to extract cryptographic secrets from hardware.
Security analysis of approximate hardware for energy-efficient computation.
Investigating timing side-channel vulnerabilities in NoC architectures.
Securing microfluidic biochips against tampering, IP piracy, and attacks.
Received an International Exchanges Award from the Royal Society of London for the project 'Securing Future Electronic Chips Against Side Channel Attacks' with Dr. Amit Kumar Singh from University of Essex. Project started March 31, 2025.
Oswa Amro submitted his PhD thesis on 'Acoustic Side Channel Attacks and Evaluation: A Study of Instruction Set Disassembly and Privacy Leakage Assessment on IoT Devices and Smart Phones'.
Accepted papers in ACM TECS (Dual-Mode Rounding, SATGuard), Journal of Systems Architecture (Error Metrics), IEEE ESL (Door Knock), and conferences including CODES+ISSS, ICCAD, SPACE, ASIACCS, ISQED.
Selected as C3iHub Associate Fellow for 2024-2025 by the C3I Innovation Hub, IIT Kanpur.
Published work on Biochip-PUF for microfluidic biochips in ITC 2023. Technology transfer to Texas Instruments (Power Side Channel Resistant AES Core) in 2023.
Paper 'CPU-Doctor: when a device's heartbeat can be an acoustic side-channel disassembler' published in Journal of Cryptographic Engineering.
Received best reviewer award in the ACM CCS 2022 conference, one of the top venues for computer security.
Secure Resource-Constrained Communication Framework for Tactical Networks using Physically Unclonable Functions transferred to DRDO CAIR, India.
Paper '3PAA: A Private PUF Protocol for Anonymous Authentication' enlisted in Top 50 most popular papers in IEEE TIFS as of December 2020.
Won second prize for ATS Best Doctoral Thesis Award (Semifinal for TTTC McCluskey Doctoral Thesis Award) at 28th IEEE Asian Test Symposium, Kolkata. Also felicitated by IEEE Computer Society Conference Participation Grant for Young Women Researchers.
Presented dissertation research in PhD Forum at Design Automation Conference 2019, Las Vegas, NV, USA. Hosted by ACM SIGDA & IEEE CEDA with 30% acceptance rate.
Won the most creative project award in the Blockchain Spirit Hackathon at NTU Singapore.
Hardware Security for Internet of Things
2021-22-I, 2022-23-I, 2023-24-I, 2025-26-I
Computer Organisation
2021-22-II, 2022-23-II
Computer Architecture
2025-26-II
Design for Security
2023-24-II
Fundamentals of Computing
2024-25-I
SETTLOR
Secure Embedded and Smart Things Laboratory
Co-Incharge
Dr. Debapriya Basu Roy
Dr. Oswa Amro
Acoustic Side Channel Attacks and Evaluation: A Study of Instruction Set Disassembly and Privacy Leakage Assessment on IoT Devices and Smart Phones
Thesis submitted May 2025
Machine Learning Attacks on Physically Unclonable Functions
Joint supervision with Prof. Ramesh Karri and Prof. Purushottam Kar. Joint PhD of IIT Kanpur and New York University Brooklyn.
Himanshu Pandey
Power Side Channel Attacks on Intel Processors
| # | Student Name | Project Title | Solo / Joint Supervision |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hirak Mondal | Security Evaluation of Authentication Protocols for Unmanned Air Vehicle Infrastructure | Sole Supervision |
| 2 | Chandan Kumar | Sorting Attacks Resilient Authentication Protocol for CMOS Image Sensor Based PUF – I | Sole Supervision |
| 3 | Swapnil Gade | Designing a Physically Unclonable Function Based Mutual Authentication Protocol for Keyless Automotive Entry System | Sole Supervision |
| 4 | Pushpraj Naik | Network Data Remanence Side-Channel Attack on SPREAD, H-SPREAD and Reverse AODV | Sole Supervision |
| 5 | Anuj Shrivastava | Lightweight Group Authentication Protocol for Swarm of Drones using SRAM PUF | Sole Supervision |
| 6 | Manthan Kojage | Machine Learning Attacks on Low-Cost Reconfigurable XRRO and XRBR PUF Designs | Sole Supervision |
| 7 | Prajwal P. Thakare | Secure Secret Sharing Protocol Against Network Data Remanence Side Channel Attacks | Sole Supervision |
| 8 | Mayuresh Shandilya | Design of Approximate Floating-Point Computing Format | Sole Supervision |
| 9 | Deepak Kumar | RStopper: Deception-Based Ransomware Detection | Sole Supervision |
| 10 | Akash Panzade | Vigilantly Watching Ransomware for Robust Trapping and Containment | Sole Supervision |
| 11 | Abhishek Revskar | Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency Assisted Acoustic Side Channel Attack to Retrieve Dialled Call Log | Sole Supervision |
| 12 | Akash Shriwas | Toolkit for Vulnerability Analysis and Penetration Testing – I | Prof. Subhajit Roy |
| 13 | Lavkush Mani Tripathi | Toolkit for Vulnerability Analysis and Penetration Testing – II | Prof. Subhajit Roy |
| 14 | Aditya Sunilkumar Kankriya | SRAM PUF-Based Secure Communication and Recognition in Drone Swarms | Sole Supervision |
| 15 | Amit Kumar | SAC Assisted Machine Learning Attacks on Feed Forward PUF Compositions | Sole Supervision |
| 16 | Anurag Kamal | Sorting Attacks Resilient Authentication Protocol for CMOS Image Sensor Based PUF – II | Sole Supervision |
| 17 | Ashee Jain | Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Virtual Keyboard on Smartphones | Sole Supervision |
| 18 | Kapilkumar Kathiriya | Security Protocol Analysis of Trezor Wallet | Prof. Debapriya Basu Roy |
| 19 | Pratik Patil | Developing Test Bed for Far-Field Side Channel Attack on Mixed Signal Chip | Prof. Debapriya Basu Roy |
| 20 | Subhajit Panday | Machine Learning Attacks on the WiSARD PUF | Prof. Purushottam Kar |
| 21 | Shubhashish Moitra | Integer Exfiltration via Hamming-Weight Measurements – II | Prof. Purushottam Kar |
| 22 | K Vamsee Krishna | Developing Test Bed for Screen Gleaning Attack on Smartphones for OTP Retrieval | Prof. Debapriya Basu Roy |
| 23 | Kush Shah | TEASE: A Leak-Resilient Protocol for Strong PUFs | Prof. Purushottam Kar |
| 24 | Anshul Purohit | Intelligent Method for Smart Platform Vulnerability Analysis and Penetration Testing – User Interface Design | Prof. Subhajit Roy |
| 25 | Himanshu Karnatak | Formal Verification and AI for Proof Assistant | Prof. Indranil Saha |
| 26 | Pratibha Gupta | Intelligent Method for Smart Platform Vulnerability Analysis and Penetration Testing – Building for AP | Prof. Subhajit Roy |
| 27 | Ruby Prajapati | Intelligent Method for Smart Platform Vulnerability Analysis and Penetration Testing – LLM-Based Report Generation | Prof. Subhajit Roy |
| 28 | Abhinandan Singh Baghel | Privacy Attacks on RAG-Enabled Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models | Sole Supervision |
Dual-Mode Rounding Algorithms and Hardware for Posit-based DNN Training: The Future of Mixed Precision Frameworks
Vishesh Mishra, Mahendra Rathor, Urbi Chatterjee
SATGuard: SAT-driven Countermeasures for Protecting Approximate Circuits from Hardware Trojan
Vishesh Mishra, Dipesh, Sparsh Mittal, Urbi Chatterjee
Novel Hybrid Probabilistic-Statistical Error Metrics for Approximate Adders
Vishesh Mishra, Sparsh Mittal, Urbi Chatterjee
Door Knock: Reverse Engineering the MPSoC Layout through Timing Attack on NoC
Dipesh and Urbi Chatterjee
VADF: Versatile Approximate Data Formats for Energy-Efficient Computing
Vishesh Mishra, Sparsh Mittal, Neelofar Hassan, Rekha Singhal, Urbi Chatterjee
CPU-Doctor: when a device's heartbeat can be an acoustic side-channel disassembler
Oswa Amro, Vishesh Mishra, Rohit Negi, Urbi Chatterjee
Birds of the Same Feather Flock Together: A Dual-Mode Circuit Candidate for Strong PUF-TRNG Functionalities
K. Pratihar, U. Chatterjee, M. Alam, R. S. Chakraborty, D. Mukhopadhyay
3PAA: A Private PUF Protocol for Anonymous Authentication
Urbi Chatterjee, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty
Building PUF based Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for IoT without Explicit CRPs in Verifier Database
Urbi Chatterjee, Vidya Govindan, Rajat Sadhukhan, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, Debashis Mahata, Mukesh Prabhu
A PUF-based Secure Communication Protocol for IoT
Urbi Chatterjee, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
SETTLOR
The Secure Embedded and Smart Things Laboratory (SETTLOR) at the C3I Center of IIT Kanpur, established in March 2021, focuses on critical research in hardware and embedded system security, addressing challenges posed by emerging technologies. Dr. Urbi Chatterjee is the lab-incharge, and Dr. Debapriya Basu Roy serves as Co-Incharge. The lab consists of seven PhD students, including one international student, supported through prestigious fellowships like PMRF and TCS Research Fellowship. SETTLOR collaborates with funding agencies including IIT Kanpur, C3i Hub, DRDO, SRC, ISEA, IITK-NYU Research Grant, and Royal Society, London.
International Exchanges Award 2024 from the Royal Society of London
C3iHub Associate Fellow (2022-23, 2024-2025), C3I Innovation Hub, IIT Kanpur
Best Reviewer Award, ACM CCS 2022
Member of Indian Radio Software Architecture Standardisation Team of DEAL, DRDO
3PAA paper in Top 50 most popular papers in IEEE TIFS
Second prize, ATS Best Doctoral Thesis Award (Semifinal for TTTC McCluskey Doctoral Thesis Award), 28th IEEE Asian Test Symposium
IEEE Computer Society Conference Participation Grant for Young Women Researchers
PhD Forum at Design Automation Conference 2019 (30% acceptance rate)
ACM TECS Best Paper Award nomination for PUF-based secure communication protocol
Most creative project award, Blockchain Spirit Hackathon, NTU Singapore
International Travel Support from SERB, Govt. of India for DATE 2018
1st position in Applied Research Competition, 2nd in Embedded Security Challenge, Cyber Security Awareness Week, IIT Kanpur
Best paper award, Workshop for Women in Hardware and Systems Security (WISE), IEEE HOST 2017
Grade A project award, Grand Challenge: Smart Embedded Applications and IoT, IIT Patna
2nd position in Applied Research Competition, Cyber Security Awareness Week, IIT Kanpur
