IIT Guwahati Team Working Towards Protecting Data From Cyber Attacks
The Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT Guwahati) has tied up with University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, to work on an indigenous algorithm that seeks to protect the nation's digital data from cyber-attacks by advanced computers. The team is also developing indigenous algorithms to protect digital data from cyber attacks and encryption architectures to protect sensitive health data that is transmitted through the internet.
The team of led by Dr Gaurav Trivedi, Associate Professor, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering of IIT Guwahati, also includes Professor Srinivasan Krishnaswamy, Assistant Professor, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, and Professor Zdenek Nemec and Professor Jan Pidanic from the University of Pardubice.
The team of IIT Guwahati also consists of research scholars of IIT Guwahati -- Mr Bikram Paul, Ms Uddipana Dowerah, Mr Tarun Kumar Yadav, Mr Balbir Singh, Mr Abhishek Agrawal, Ms Meenali Janveja, and Mr Souradip Pal.
The team's work has been published in the proceedings of IEEE International Conference Radioelektronika (RADIOELEKTRONIKA) and has received 3rd best paper award by IEEE Czechoslovakia Section based on its research contributions.
An IIT Guwahati statement released said: “While sensitive data is stringently protected by encryption (the virtual ‘lock' for precious data), the power of quantum computers can easily break even apparently “invincible” encryption codes. It is generally feared that once quantum computers become the predominant workhorse of the near-future digital era, almost all existing data-protective encryption schemes would become vulnerable and obsolete.”
“It has become indispensable to design new encryption schemes that can resist both quantum computers as well as classical computer-based attacks,” says Dr Trivedi.
The team has developed various encryption algorithms and designed indigenous soft IPs which can be integrated into Systems-on-Chip (SoC) to protect them from cyber attacks, thereby enhancing the safety of our nation against cyber-attacks, added the IIT Guwahati statement.
The IIT Guwahati team, the statement added, has also worked towards enhancing data security in the healthcare sector that is increasingly using the Internet-of-Things (IoT) to cater to the needs of the country. IoT healthcare aids in the real-time diagnosis of diseases by keeping a patient digitally connected to a medical expert 24x7, thus avoiding the visits and admissions in the hospital, a facility particularly critical in these pandemic times.
“We have developed an area- and power-efficient Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) architecture that can encrypt and decrypt ECG data for transmission across the Internet. This is also suitable for low power IoT applications,” said Dr Trivedi.
Speaking about the work done by Dr Trivedi's team, Professor TG Sitharam, Director, IIT Guwahati, said: “Both these electronic devices are the results of the joint efforts of IIT Guwahati and the University of Pardubice with whom we have successful collaboration for the past nine years. These devices are in-line with India's vision of self-reliance and independence from foreign technology”.