As digital devices become increasingly embedded in everyday life, cybersecurity threats continue to evolve. While much attention is given to software vulnerabilities, the physical hardware inside devices can also expose sensitive information in ways that are often overlooked. From smartphones and medical equipment to defense technologies, computer chips can unintentionally leak data through their physical properties, creating security risks that cannot be fixed with a simple software update.
Meet PhD candidate Md Sadik Awal from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, whose dissertation explores hardware-level information leakage and its implications for cybersecurity. His research focuses on device impedance, a measure of how a chip resists electrical signals, as an unexpected source of information exposure. Through his work, Sadik has demonstrated that these physical signals can expose cryptographic keys, software instructions, and data stored in emerging memory technologies, all without exploiting software flaws or weaknesses in encryption algorithms.
By exposing vulnerabilities that exist beneath the software layer, Sadik’s research highlights a critical challenge facing the technology industry, government agencies, and defense organizations. Because hardware vulnerabilities are rooted in a device’s physical design, addressing them often requires more extensive mitigation strategies than software bugs. His work provides both foundational knowledge and real-world demonstrations that can help guide the development of more secure chips and electronic systems in the future.
Sadik’s interest in hardware security began during an undergraduate microprocessor course, where he realized that hardware serves as the foundation for every application, encryption system, and security protocol. As he learned more about the field, he became fascinated by the idea that the hardware itself could leak sensitive information and that these vulnerabilities were far more difficult to mitigate than traditional software threats. That realization inspired him to pursue one of the most challenging and underexplored areas of cybersecurity research.
Expected to graduate in Summer 2026, Sadik’s research is helping expand our understanding of hardware security and encouraging a new approach to building trustworthy computing systems that are secure not only in their functionality, but also in their physical implementation.
(Fun fact: While popular depictions of hackers often involve keyboards and computer screens, hardware security research relies on tools such as oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, and signal generators. In many ways, the lab looks more like a physics experiment than a cybersecurity operation because the secrets being uncovered are hidden in the physical behavior of the chip itself.)