Paper Title: Firewall of Things, Firewall of Memory Chips

Paper Abstract: Recently, any kind of manufacturing is a target of cyber-attack, which damages supply chains and economic system. Each factory has several thousand units of equipment. Each unit of equipment has 100 parameters to be controlled. An operator must operate nearly a million parameters in total. As the scale of manufacturing increases, more parameters are necessary to be controlled. This scale is causing AI to replace human operators to remotely control a huge number of parameters in manufacturing. But untrusted or fake data input may cause AI malfunction. Any unit of equipment is an IoT device that provides data to AI through the internet. Cyberattacks can damage this equipment or manufacturing operations. A firewall is useful to divide certified logical accounts from each other. By using one for IoT devices (e.g., equipment in a manufacturing line) which is connected between multiple locations, we can confine data to be transferred for AI inside the certified firewall regardless of where the connected devices exist. But the linkage of IoT devices and a logical accounts is not always trusted. The atomistic component of connected things (IoT devices) is a memory chip. We illustrate how to form a firewall of memory chips, i.e., a firewall of things. It can make a Merkle tree in a memory chip.

Paper Author: Hiroshi Watanabe, Professor, National Chiao Tung University

Author Bio: Hiroshi Watanabe, PhD, is a professor teaching flash memory, semiconductor technologies and quantum physics in dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He has published many journal & conference papers and invented more than 150 granted patents all over the world (including more than 60 US granted). Until 2010, he had worked for Toshiba’s Headquarter RD Center and been engaged in the reliability study of electron devices including NAND Flash. He received PhD in theoretical physics in 1994 from U. Tsukuba, Japan. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. CAB member of FMS since 2018.