Tuesday, November 25, 2025 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM | Via Zoom

Dr. Jeyavijayan (JV) Rajendran

Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University

Abstract:  Hardware is at the heart of computing systems. However, recent years have seen increased attacks exploiting hardware vulnerabilities and exploits, which even traditional software-based protections cannot prevent. Hardware fuzzing has shown promise in detecting vulnerabilities in large-scale designs like modern processors. In this talk, I will describe the hardware vulnerabilities in hardware description languages, such as Verilog and VHDL. Then, I will explain a new and radical approach called hardware fuzzing to find these vulnerabilities and detail how fuzzing techniques can be combined with existing formal verification techniques to detect vulnerabilities efficiently. Finally, I will discuss a strategy for pinpointing vulnerabilities to accelerate the mitigation process and briefly talk about improving the efficiency of hardware fuzzing using ML/AI techniques, such as multi-armed bandit (MAB) and large language models (LLM).

Biography:  Dr. Jeyavijayan (JV) Rajendran is an Associate Professor and an ASCEND Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from New York University in August 2015. His research interests include hardware security and computer security. His research has won the NSF CAREER Award in 2017, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2022, the IEEE CEDA Ernest Kuh Early Career Award in 2021, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding Young Faculty Award in 2019, the Intel Academic Leadership Award, along with several best student paper awards and best PhD dissertation awards. He is also an alumnus of the National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering, 2023, and serves on NASEM/NAE committees. He organizes and has co‐founded Hack@DAC, a student security competition co-located with DAC and SUSHI.

Register here: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/512380