Nguyen and Yilmaz graduated with their Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) this past summer, and they now work for companies in Atlanta. Nguyen works for Synopsys, and Yilmaz works for Aether Argus. They were co-advised by ECE Associate Professor Alenka Zajic and Milos Prvulovic, who is a professor in the School of Computer Science. Both Zajic and Prvulovic are co-authors on the paper.

The title of Nguyen’s and Yilmaz’s award-winning paper is “A Novel Golden-Chip-Free Clustering Technique Using Backscattering Side Channel for Hardware Trojan Detection.” This paper demonstrated that hardware Trojans can be detected using backscattering RF side-channels, which are signals that were discovered by the authors, and anomaly detection techniques without having a "golden sample," a fabricated sample verified to be free of hardware Trojans. 

This paper was able to achieve 100% accuracy when testing 100 boards and classifying them into infected and non-infected categories using backscattering RF side-channels of the chips on those boards, including in noisy environments with multiple active devices present. This technology will enable improved supply chain security by testing devices prior to deployment.