Kevin Hutto, a Ph.D. candidate in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received the Best Paper Award at the 2022 Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing (MECO). MECO covers the theory, technology, design, and applications of embedded/cyber-physical systems. Conference papers are published in IEEE Xplore with a competitive citation rate.

Hutto’s paper, “RanCompute: Computational Security in Embedded Devices via Random Input and Output Encodings,” won the top award this year from over 150 papers published. His co-authors are his Ph.D. advisor, Vincent Mooney, and fellow ECE professor Santiago Grijalva.

The paper presents a new method to protect sensor computation by means of randomly encoding inputs and outputs. The random encoding is known to a remote secure server but changes every cycle with a one-way function, thus an adversary who captures the sensor and successfully reverse engineers the entire microchip including all logic and memory still cannot interpret data or computation backwards in time. Sample applications of edge detection and variance computation are shown with their results and computational hardware indistinguishable to an adversary.

This year’s conference was held June 7-10, 2022, in Budva, Montenegro. With an excellent citation score and strong keynote program featuring outstanding, multidisciplinary speakers, including Nobel laureates, MECO has become a major event in the computing systems calendar.