In This Story
Tanvir Arafin’s work on multiple directions on hardware security is recognized around the world, but there is one insight that is particularly near-and-dear to his heart.
He remembers a moment distinctly. “I was walking home and it was raining very hard, and I had my first eureka moment. That moment defined the rest of the trajectory of my professional life,” said the assistant professor in George Mason’s Department of Cyber Security Engineering. “I’m married and have two kids, but if someone asked me, ‘What’s the best moment of your life,’ I’d have to say that,” he said with a laugh.
You could say Arafin’s moment of inspiration came right on time, as it had to do with clocks. He was considering that though two clocks appear to be perfectly synced, they never are. Real-time clocks, as they are called, such as the ones used in your cell phone, use a crystal oscillator—a tiny component made from quartz crystal that vibrates when electric current passes through it. Arafin said, “You can never make two crystals the same, so you can pick up that very slight variation between them and use that to see if somebody is attacking your GPS signal. Since GPS gives you a very accurate reference for measuring this variation, an attack on GPS breaks such measurement.”
The paper that resulted from his insight was nominated for the Best Paper Award at the 2017 Association for Computing Machinery Great Lakes Symposium on Very Large Scale Integration.
Before landing at George Mason, Arafin moved between academe and industry. In the midst of moving five times in five years he spent time with both Bosch, an engineering firm, and the health technology company, Philips. “There, I worked on building real solutions for hardware-based authentication, which defined part of my thesis,” he said, “And I had patents with Bosch on how you can use a physical layer to securely distribute keys to authentication in automotive systems.”
Arafin was working at Morgan State University when he transitioned his research into transportation systems security. He said, “We showed that if you take out a car’s motherboard and just do basic reverse engineering, you can infer a lot of private information, like driving details, as well as company secrets. During my talk at Mason as part of my interview process, I showed how anyone can take off a car’s infotainment system, take out the flash memory, connect it to a laptop, and, if lucky, find all kinds of private information.”
His presentation made such an impact that he got the job at George Mason. The first course he taught was secure transportation systems design, a relatively new course giving him the freedom to explore the overall state of transportation systems security issues. Now, in his CYSE 465 class, he teaches students the insecurities and vulnerabilities of a modern car. Students from this class swept the National Transportation Cybersecurity Competition last year, winning first, second, and third places.
Arafin is relatively concerned with how few people teach transportation system security, noting that most people who go into the auto industry are from electrical and civil engineering, lacking cyber skills. He is working with the University of California, Merced and the University of Houston on a new $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for cyber training on securing autonomous and automotive systems. “We’ll teach the next generation of researchers. First, we’ll build the research materials to do advanced research on automotive cyber infrastructure, then distribute this research to faculty throughout the country.” Also, his collaboration with Howard University has landed a new $600,000 grant from NSF for secure implementation of foundation models for autonomous systems.
He said that over the last six years across Morgan State and George Mason, he has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects that have collectively secured more than $9 million in external funding, a significant portion of which is from the NSF Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, which grants cybersecurity scholarships requiring a service obligation following graduation. He particularly likes SFS because of the way it supports students; as someone who felt funding pressure as a graduate student, he now makes it a priority to find funding for his own.
From that rainy walk years ago to the cutting-edge research he leads today, Arafin continues to set the pace for innovations that will keep transportation secure for miles to come.