The Secure and Robust Electronics Center (SURE) strives to be a US center of excellence for secure, robust hardware R&D to help protect national security, advance industry capabilities and competitiveness, and ensure that citizens can rely on the integrity of their own devices. SURE performs applied research to make chips trustworthy, secure, resilient and reliable.  

SURE is a unit of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), part of the University of Southern California’s highly ranked Viterbi School of Engineering. We investigate state-of-the-art manufacturing complexities that significantly have compromised the critical aspects of chip production. As experienced industry collaborators, SURE researchers also aim to accelerate the scale, pace, and impact of hardware robustness and security technology development. In addition to these technology developments, SURE  seeks to meet an urgent cybersecurity need: electronics hardware safety. This hardware security is the foundation on which software security rests. The more powerful integrated circuits become, the more opportunities materialize for their integrity to be compromised.  

Disclosable government, industry and higher education partners and supporters that we have closely worked with (past and present) include: DARPA, IARPA, NASA, the Army Research Office, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Xilinx Inc, Altera Corporation, Synopsys, Cadence, Stanford, Virginia Tech, Brigham Young University, Arizona State, University of North Carolina and Georgia Tech Research Institute.  

ISI pioneered fabless foundries with its launch of MOSIS service in 1981, and continues to be integral to academic, corporate and national security chip design and prototyping. MOSIS has delivered more than 50,000 chip designs to customers ranging from research groups to Fortune 500 corporations. We also draw on other ISI areas of expertise, including the Center for Computer Systems Security; high-performance and cloud computing; and Internet and networked systems, along with the Viterbi School. 

ISI is headquartered in Marina del Rey, California. SURE operates in the Marina and in Arlington, Virginia. 

 

Sure in the USC Viterbi magazine