George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Director and Research Professor, Coordinated Science Laboratory

Ph.D., University of Queensland, Australia, 1977.

Research Interests: computer measurement and modeling, reliable and secure networks and systems, system design environments

Professor Iyer is interested in developing and analyzing techniques for developing secure and reliable systems. He leads several projects in this area. One project is the Reconfigurable Reliability and Security Engine. A common processor-level framework that can provide application-aware reliability and security is attractive and timely. The Reliability and Security Engine project at Illinois is developing a common framework to provide a variety of application-aware techniques for error-detection, masking of security vulnerabilities, and recovery under one umbrella in a uniform, low-overhead manner. Hardware-implemented error-detection and security mechanisms are embedded as modules in the hardware-level framework, called the Reliability and Security Engine (RSE), which has been designed as an integral part of a superscalar microprocessor. The embedded hardware modules execute in parallel with the core pipeline. The goal of the project is to provide application-aware runtime checking techniques to guard against both accidental failures and malicious attacks.