Workshop

Day-01. Introduction to Cellular Automata by Prof. Sukanta Das

Speaker:Prof. Sukanta Das

Brief Bio of the Speaker: Prof. Sukanta Das currently works as Associate Professor and Head in the Department of Information Technology of Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur (formerly known as Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur). He received his PhD in 2007 from Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur and Masters in Engineering in 2002 from Bengal Engineering College (DU) (Currently known as IIEST, Shibpur) in Computer Science and Technology. He joined his alma mater as a faculty in 2003. He has been doing research in the different aspects of cellular automata for more than twenty years. His research area includes Cellular Automata: Theory and Applications. He is also a Member of IFIP Working Group 1.5 (on “Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems”) and several programming committees for international conferences on cellular automata. He has more than 70 articles under his name. Currently he is exploring the computational abilities of cellular automata, the non-uniform cellular automata, (partial) number conservation in cellular automata, and chaos and randomness in cellular automata. Apart from the research, Prof. Das is also an active member of the Science and Rationalists' Association of India, a rationalist organization dedicated to advocate against pseudoscience, astrology and mysticism. He is known for his active role in science awareness in common people and school children.

Abstract:In this talk, we shall discuss the basic concepts of cellular automata - their definition, variations and classification. As an example of cellular automaton, we shall discuss the Game-of-Life, a zero-player game developed by John Conway. Two special classes of configurations named Finite configurations and Periodic configurations will also be discussed in this talk. We shall then turn our attention to Elementary Cellular Automata, a class of one-dimensional binary cellular automata. Finally, we shall conclude our talk by finite and linear cellular automata.

- March 15, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-01. Hardware Security in the Connected World by Prof. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay

Speaker:Prof. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay

Brief Bio of the Speaker: Debdeep Mukhopadhyay is currently a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-Kharagpur, India. At IIT Kharagpur he initiated the Secured Embedded Architecture Laboratory (SEAL), with a focus on Hardware Security. He had worked as, visiting scientist at NTU Singapore, visiting Associate Professor of NYU-Shanghai, Assistant Professor at IIT-Madras, and as Visiting Researcher at NYU Tandon-School-of-Engineering, USA. He holds a PhD, an MS, and a B. Tech from IIT Kharagpur, India. His books include Fault Tolerant Architectures for Cryptography and Hardware Security (Springer), Cryptography and Network Security (Mc GrawHills), Hardware Security: Design, Threats, and Safeguards (CRC Press), and Timing Channels in Cryptography (Springer). He has written more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals and collaborated with several Indian/Foreign Organizations. He has been in the program committee and editorial boards of several top International conferences and journals. Debdeep is the recipient of the Swarnajayanti DST Fellowship 2015-16, Data Security Council of India Award for Cyber Security Education, ASEM-DUO Fellowship, INSA Young Scientist award, INAE Young Engineer award, IAS Young Associateship. He was awarded the Outstanding Young Faculty fellowship from IIT Kharagpur, and the Techno-Inventor Best PhD award from the Indian-Semiconductor-Association. He has recently incubated a start-up on Hardware Security, ESP Pvt Ltd at IIT Kharagpur, and is a senior member of IEEE and ACM.

Abstract:With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) the need and challenges of hardware security have increased manifold. Starting from the miniature devices, which are often resource constrained, to the pervasive omni-present cloud, all avenues for a potential attack need to be mitigated. In this talk, we discuss starting from physical security of the "things" in an IoT framework to developing dedicated cryptographic techniques for delegating data in the cloud. The talk covers several topics involving secured implementation, by addressing issues like side channel analysis countermeasures, physically unclonable functions, their adoption in the context of IoT security, and finally new encryption techniques suited for delegating processing on the cloud, yet ensuring privacy of information.

- March 15, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-01. Survey of Classical Cellular Automata Theory by Prof. Jarkko Kari

Speaker:Prof. Jarkko Kari

Brief Bio of the Speaker: Prof. Jarkko J Kari is currently a professor at the Department of Mathematics, University of Turku and a leading personality in the domain of Theoretical Computer Science, especially for his contributions to the theory of Wang tiles and Cellular Automata. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Turku. In a remarkable work, he has proved that the reversibility of two-dimensional CA is an undecidable problem. He is one of the pioneers of developing security systems using reversible CA. His research interest also includes computation theory, automata theory and image compression. Besides serving as chair, committee member and editor of some premier conferences and journals and has delivered invited lectures and tutorials all over the globe in the domain of Theoretical Computer Science.

Abstract:Cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems that are of interest in both automata theory and symbolic dynamics. Due to the simplicity and purity of the concept, they have found applications in modeling various physical systems. Cellular automata can also be viewed as massively parallel computers consisting of a uniform array of very simple computing elements with local interconnections. In this talk we review classical results such as the Garden-of-Eden-theorem and Hedlund's theorem. Reversibility and surjectivity of cellular automata are of particular interest. We recall several undecidable questions concerning cellular automata, and survey results on topological dynamics aspects such as sensitivity and mixing properties. The aim is to provide a brief overview of classical cellular automata theory.

- March 15, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-02. Reversibility, Semi-Reversibility and Reachability Tree (Talk 1) by Dr. Kamalika Bhattacharjee

Speaker:Dr. Kamalika Bhattacharjee

Brief Bio of the Speaker:

Abstract:ICellular automaton (CA), a discrete dynamical system, has enraptured the attention of researchers to study many of the foundational problems of nature. The reversibility property of a CA refers to that every configuration of the CA has only one predecessor. That is, a CA is reversible if and only if its global transition function is a bijective map. However, Hedlund and Richardson independently proved that all injective CAs are reversible. That is, reversible cellular automata are injective CAs where the configurations follow one-to-one relationship. Classically CAs are defined over infinite lattice, where reversibility is decided based on the local rule only. There are two seminal algorithms to decide reversibility of 1-dimensional classical CAs. In this talk, we shall discuss one such algorithm proposed by Sutner which uses de Bruijn Graphs. While studying the reversibility (i.e. injectivity) of infinite and finite CAs, one can identify (at least) the following four cases.
1. An infinite CA whose global function is injective on the set of “all infinite configurations”.
2. An infinite CA whose global function is injective on the set of “all periodic configurations”.
3. An infinite CA whose global function is injective on the set of “all finite configurations of length n” for all n∈ℕ.
4. A finite CA whose global function is injective on the set of “all configurations of length n” for a fixed n.
Hence, in one-dimension, cases 1, 2 and 3 are equivalent, and the Case 4 is different from them. However, it may be mentioned here that finite CAs (Case 4) are the interest of researchers, when they are targeted to solve some real-life problems. In case of finite CAs, we have to assume some boundaries. The most popular boundary schemes are periodic and null boundary CAs.

- March 16, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-02. Reversibility, Semi-Reversibility and Reachability Tree (Talk 2) by Dr. Kamalika Bhattacharjee

Speaker:Dr. Kamalika Bhattacharjee

Brief Bio of the Speaker:

Abstract:Cellular automaton (CA), a discrete dynamical system, has enraptured the attention of researchers to study many of the foundational problems of nature. The reversibility property of a CA refers to that every configuration of the CA has only one predecessor. That is, a CA is reversible if and only if its global transition function is a bijective map. However, Hedlund and Richardson independently proved that all injective CAs are reversible. That is, reversible cellular automata are injective CAs where the configurations follow one-to-one relationship. Classically CAs are defined over infinite lattice, where reversibility is decided based on the local rule only. There are two seminal algorithms to decide reversibility of 1-dimensional classical CAs. In this talk, we shall discuss one such algorithm proposed by Sutner which uses de Bruijn Graphs. While studying the reversibility (i.e. injectivity) of infinite and finite CAs, one can identify (at least) the following four cases.
1. An infinite CA whose global function is injective on the set of “all infinite configurations”.
2. An infinite CA whose global function is injective on the set of “all periodic configurations”.
3. An infinite CA whose global function is injective on the set of “all finite configurations of length n” for all n∈ℕ.
4. A finite CA whose global function is injective on the set of “all configurations of length n” for a fixed n.
Hence, in one-dimension, cases 1, 2 and 3 are equivalent, and the Case 4 is different from them. However, it may be mentioned here that finite CAs (Case 4) are the interest of researchers, when they are targeted to solve some real-life problems. In case of finite CAs, we have to assume some boundaries. The most popular boundary schemes are periodic and null boundary CAs.

- March 16, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-02. Decidability in Group Cellular Automata by Prof. Jarkko Kari

Speaker:Prof. Jarkko Kari

Brief Bio of the Speaker:Prof. Jarkko J Kari is currently a professor at the Department of Mathematics, University of Turku and a leading personality in the domain of Theoretical Computer Science, especially for his contributions to the theory of Wang tiles and Cellular Automata. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Turku.

Abstract:Many undecidable questions concerning cellular automata are known to be decidable when the cellular automaton has a suitable algebraic structure. Typical situations include linear cellular automata where the states come from a finite field or a finite commutative ring, and so-called additive cellular automata in the case the states come from a finite commutative group and the cellular automaton is a group homomorphism. In this talk we generalize the setup and consider so-called group cellular automata whose state set is any (possibly non-commutative) finite group and the cellular automaton is a group homomorphism. The configuration space may be any group shift - a subshift that is a subgroup of the full shift - and still many properties are decidable in any dimension of the cellular space. Our decidability proofs are based on algorithms to manipulate group shifts, and on viewing the set of space-time diagrams of group cellular automata as multidimensional group shifts. The trace shift and the limit set of the cellular automaton are lower dimensional projections of the space-time diagrams and they can be effectively constructed. This view provides algorithms to decide injectivity, surjectivity, equicontinuity, sensitivity and nilpotency of the cellular automaton. Non-transitivity is semi-decidable. We also easily establish that injectivity always implies surjectivity, that transitivity implies mixingness, that non-sensitivity implies equicontinuity, and that jointly periodic points are dense in the limit set. The talk is based on a joint work with Pierre Béaur.

- March 16, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-03. Feeling secure: the need for formal proof of security (Talk 1) by Prof. R. Ramanujam

Speaker:Prof. R. Ramanujam

Brief Bio of the Speaker: Prof. R Ramanujam is a professor in the Theoretical Computer Science research group in The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India. He got his BE (Hons) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani and his PhD in Computer Science from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. After postdoctoral research at the City University of New York, he joined the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai as faculty in 1987.

Abstract:When we have complex software systems with complex security requirements, claims that specific mechanisms achieve the desired goals need careful verification, which is a matter of logic and proof. Formal proofs of security are in general difficult, and we outline a methodology for the algorithmic verification of security protocols and access control systems.

- March 17, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-03. Feeling secure: the need for formal proof of security (Talk 2) by Prof. R. Ramanujam

Speaker:Prof. R. Ramanujam

Brief Bio of the Speaker: Prof. R Ramanujam is a professor in the Theoretical Computer Science research group in The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India. He got his BE (Hons) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani and his PhD in Computer Science from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. After postdoctoral research at the City University of New York, he joined the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai as faculty in 1987.

Abstract:When we have complex software systems with complex security requirements, claims that specific mechanisms achieve the desired goals need careful verification, which is a matter of logic and proof. Formal proofs of security are in general difficult, and we outline a methodology for the algorithmic verification of security protocols and access control systems.

- March 17, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-03. Randomness in Cellular Automata by Dr. Kamalika Bhattacharjee

Speaker:Dr. Kamalika Bhattacharjee, NIT, Trichy

Abstract:Society, arts, culture, science and even daily life is engulfed by the concept of randomness. A selection of an object is called random, if each possible outcome has an equal chance of getting selected irrespective of the order of the objects. In fact, this notion of randomness is one of the most perplexing and frequently encountered concepts in nature and society. In the philosophy of science, randomness is often related to indeterminism, unpredictability, probability and chance. It is also often associated with information entropy. Thanks to quantum mechanics and chaos theory, some even consider nature as random at a fundamental level. This makes the study of randomness a bewitching observation of nature.

- March 17, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-04. Non-Uniformity in Cellular Automata and Applications by Prof. Sukanta Das

Speaker:Prof. Sukanta Das

Brief Bio of the Speaker: Prof. Sukanta Das currently works as Associate Professor and Head in the Department of Information Technology of Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur (formerly known as Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur). He received his PhD in 2007 from Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur and Masters in Engineering in 2002 from Bengal Engineering College (DU) (Currently known as IIEST, Shibpur) in Computer Science and Technology. He joined his alma mater as a faculty in 2003. He has been doing research in the different aspects of cellular automata for more than twenty years. His research area includes Cellular Automata: Theory and Applications. He is also a Member of IFIP Working Group 1.5 (on “Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems”) and several programming committees for international conferences on cellular automata. He has more than 70 articles under his name. Currently he is exploring the computational abilities of cellular automata, the non-uniform cellular automata, (partial) number conservation in cellular automata, and chaos and randomness in cellular automata. Apart from the research, Prof. Das is also an active member of the Science and Rationalists' Association of India, a rationalist organization dedicated to advocate against pseudoscience, astrology and mysticism. He is known for his active role in science awareness in common people and school children.

Abstract:Classical cellular automata are identified by three basic properties - locality, synchronicity and uniformity. In fact, uniformly is everywhere in the structure of a cellular automaton. Synchronicity is also one kind of uniformity where all the cells are forced to get updated simultaneously. However, uniformity constraint of cellular automata has been questioned over the years and as a result, non-uniformity in cellular automata structure has been introduced. Due to the introduction of non-uniformity, we get three classes of non-classical cellular automata - Automata Networks, Asynchronous Cellular Automata and Hybrid Cellular Automata. Hybrid Cellular Automata are also known as Non-uniform Cellular Automata. In this talk, we shall spend more time on this class of cellular automata. The Non-uniform Cellular Automata have been explored since late 1980s with a target to use them as Technology. In this talk, we shall briefly revisit some application areas where the Non-uniform Cellular Automata have been used as potential solutions.

- March 18, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-04. Light but Tight: A Lightweight Crypto Framework using Cellular Automata Rules by Prof. Mukhopadhyay

Speaker:Prof. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay

Abstract:Designing lightweight ciphers is an important discourse considering the billions of resource-constrained devices which are getting inter-connected in the world of Cyber Physical Systems. However, these devices are also at the exposure of adversaries who can launch powerful physical attacks to subvert their security. These physical attacks, often called side channel attacks (SCA), work by monitoring the power consumption pattern, and electromagnetic radiations around the device leading to strong attack vectors which can subvert any cryptosystem irrespective of its mathematical strength. However, designing SCA-countermeasures are very costly, rendering them unsuitable for such constrained platforms. In this talk, we address this challenging problem of achieving lightweightness but ensuring a side channel leakage tight design. In particular, we address the two important pieces of the puzzle, the S-Box and the diffusion layer, which together forms the core of a block cipher. We explore design strategies for substitution-permutation network (SPN)-based block ciphers that make them amenable to low-cost threshold implementations (TI) - a provably secure strategy against side-channel attacks. The core building blocks for our strategy are cryptographically optimal 4×4 S-Boxes,implemented via repeated iterations of simple cellular automata (CA) rules. We present highly optimized TI circuits for such S-Boxes, that consume nearly 40% less area and power as compared to popular lightweight S-Boxes such as PRESENT and GIFT. Subsequently, we discuss the challenges in choosing diffusion layers for such S-Boxes and some suggested solutions. We finally make an attempt to combine these puzzle pieces in a VLSI design to show an end-end "light-but-tight" block cipher.

- March 18, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-04. Computer Architecture and Cellular Automata (Talk 1) by Dr. Mamata Dalui

Speaker:Dr. Mamata Dalui

Brief Bio of the Speaker:Dr. Mamata Dalui is an Assistant Professor of National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. She received her B.Tech (Computer Science and Engineering) from University of Calcutta, and her M.E. (Computer Science and Engineering) and Ph.D. (Computer Science and Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur.

Abstract:Cellular Automata (CA) as a modelling tool has long been received attention from the researchers of diverse fields - pattern recognition, image processing, study of fractals and chaos, VLSI circuit testing, modelling traffic etc. The continual quest for more scalability, robustness and versatility of CA based models to study physical systems in the world around us have forced researchers to explore several variants of CA models. Modelling a large fragment of physical systems, inherently irreversible in nature, involves special irreversible class of CA.
This lecture highlights properties of irreversible CA to model solutions for chip multiprocessors (CMPs) cache system. Irreversible CA exhibits its power in the potential application of design and verification of cache coherence in multicore architecture. The verification of coherence solution for the cache system of CMPs with hundreds of cores is found to be an important issue but with no efficient solution. Hence, the solution targets the design of a coherence verification unit realizing either snoopy or directory based cache coherence protocols for verification of coherence state in the CMPs cache system.

- March 18, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-05. Cellular Automata Based Stream Cipher - Attacks and Countermeasure 1 by Prof. Dipanwita RoyChowdhury

Speaker:Prof. Dipanwita RoyChowdhury

Brief Bio of the Speaker: Prof. Roy Chowdhury has received her B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Computer Science from the University of Calcutta in 1987 and 1989 respectively, and the PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1994. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. Prof. Roy Chowdhury is the recipient of INSA Young Scientist Award and Associate of Indian Academy of Science and is the fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineers (INAE). She is also a member of IEEE and a life member of CRSI (Cryptology Research Society of India). Her current research interests are in the field of Cellular Automata, Cryptography & Security, Error Correcting Code, and VLSI & Embedded Systems. She has published more than 250 technical papers in renowned International Journals and Conferences.

- March 19, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-05. Cellular Automata Based Stream Cipher - Attacks and Countermeasure 2 by Prof. Dipanwita RoyChowdhury

Speaker:Prof. Dipanwita RoyChowdhury

Brief Bio of the Speaker: Prof. Roy Chowdhury has received her B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Computer Science from the University of Calcutta in 1987 and 1989 respectively, and the PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1994. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. Prof. Roy Chowdhury is the recipient of INSA Young Scientist Award and Associate of Indian Academy of Science and is the fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineers (INAE). She is also a member of IEEE and a life member of CRSI (Cryptology Research Society of India). Her current research interests are in the field of Cellular Automata, Cryptography & Security, Error Correcting Code, and VLSI & Embedded Systems. She has published more than 250 technical papers in renowned International Journals and Conferences.

- March 19, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Day-05. Computer Architecture and Cellular Automata (Talk 2) by Dr. Mamata Dalui

Speaker:Dr. Mamata Dalui

Brief Bio of the Speaker:Dr. Mamata Dalui is an Assistant Professor of National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. She received her B.Tech (Computer Science and Engineering) from University of Calcutta, and her M.E. (Computer Science and Engineering) and Ph.D. (Computer Science and Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur.

Abstract:Cellular Automata (CA) as a modelling tool has long been received attention from the researchers of diverse fields - pattern recognition, image processing, study of fractals and chaos, VLSI circuit testing, modelling traffic etc. The continual quest for more scalability, robustness and versatility of CA based models to study physical systems in the world around us have forced researchers to explore several variants of CA models. Modelling a large fragment of physical systems, inherently irreversible in nature, involves special irreversible class of CA.
This lecture highlights properties of irreversible CA to model solutions for chip multiprocessors (CMPs) cache system. Irreversible CA exhibits its power in the potential application of design and verification of cache coherence in multicore architecture. The verification of coherence solution for the cache system of CMPs with hundreds of cores is found to be an important issue but with no efficient solution. Hence, the solution targets the design of a coherence verification unit realizing either snoopy or directory based cache coherence protocols for verification of coherence state in the CMPs cache system.

- March 19, 2021
Labels: One-week Online Workshop on Cellular Automata and Secured Hardware Design held on March 15 - 19, 2021
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India