SCyPSCenter for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems, UMass Lowell
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Research thrusts

Hardware security and high performance computing

If the software stack is trustworthy but the silicon lies, what have you actually secured?

Grid edge devices, embedded controllers, and HPC nodes are all built on hardware that can be modified, faulted, or silently wrong. The center works at that layer: finding trojans before tape-out, catching corruption that leaves no error, and giving a remote verifier a reason to trust a device.

What the group builds

Hardware trojan detection at RTL

Finding malicious logic in a design before it becomes silicon, where it can still be removed.

Silent data corruption detection

Corruption that produces a wrong answer without an error signal is the hardest fault in a large system. The group detects it from hardware performance counters, at a cost low enough to leave on.

Attested embedded devices

Remote attestation for the small devices at grid edges, so a controller can prove what it is running.

Parallel I/O for data-intensive science

High-performance storage and I/O paths for simulation and analysis at scale, including compression that preserves what the science needs.

Recent papers

The newest work from the faculty on this thrust. 33 papers since 2019 carry one of their names.

  1. Y. Jeong, A. Moon, E. Yu, S. W. Son
    Lightweight Stream-Based On-Device Earthquake Detection: A Sparse Profile Analysis Approach
    IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), pp. 4948-4953, Dec. 2025
  2. M. Choi, T. Azzaoui, K. Chaisson, O. Arias, S. W. Son
    Detecting Silent Data Corruption from Hardware Counters
    IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER), pp. 1-13, Sept. 2025
  3. M. Sasaninia, V. M. Vokkarane, Y. Lin, O. Arias
    Exploring a Smart FDI Attack and Enhancing Anomaly Detection in Smart Meters
    IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm), pp. 1-6, Sept. 2025
  4. J. Yoon, A. Moon, S. W. Son
    Earthquake False Alarm Detection Model Augmented with Sparse Profile Analysis
    IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), pp. 6078-6082, Aug. 2025
  5. Z. Sharifi Soltani, A. Rezaee, O. Arias, V. M. Vokkarane
    QoS-Based Recovery in 6G Optical Transport Networks: A Fast Service Prioritization Approach
    International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks (ICTON), pp. 1-4, July 2025
  6. R. Dai, Z. Liu, O. Arias, X. Guo, T. Yavuz
    Evaluating the Effectiveness of Hardware Trojan Detection Approaches at RTL
    IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), pp. 250-260, May 2025
  7. R. Dai, Z. Liu, O. Arias, X. Guo, T. Yavuz
    DTjRTL: A Configurable Framework for Automated Hardware Trojan Insertion at RTL
    Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2024, pp. 465-470, June 2024
  8. J. Yoon, A. Moon, S. W. Son
    Effective Posture Classification Using Statistically Significant Data From Flexible Pressure Sensors
    IEEE Journal on Flexible Electronics, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 173-180, May 2024

All publications

Other thrusts

Most projects cut across two or three of them.

Smart grid cybersecurity and resilienceAI and agentic systems for cyber-physical controlNext-generation optical and 6G transportFault-tolerant distributed and edge computingConnected transportation, health, and infrastructureNuclear energy and security