Eric Simpson

I completed my Masters degree in Computing Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Patrick Schaumont in May 2007. After graduation I joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory and am currently working for their Advanced Satcom Systems and Operations group.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory

In June of 2007 I joined the Advanced Satcom Systems and Operations group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory working on the Transformational Communications Satellite (TSAT) system.

McQ, Inc.

I also spent most of 2005 working for McQ, Inc. as an embedded systems engineer. While at McQ I developed various device drivers for their hardware, such as:

• Iridium Satellite Phone
• Bluetooth Modules
• Flash Storage Chips

In addition to device drivers, I developed real-time data acquistion software, and implemented DSP algorithms on TI DSPs.

Undergraduate Studies
Signals and Systems	Embedded Systems Design (I/II)
Electronics	Digital Design (I/II)
Operating Systems	Real-Time Systems
Network Application Design	Computer Architecture

Graduate Studies
Design of Systems-on-a-Chip	Advanced VLSI Design
Machine Vision	Cryptography Theory and Practice

Applied Cryptography Background

While at Virginia Tech I performed research in the Secure Embedded Systems Group with Dr. Patrick Schaumont.

Our recent work on mutual authentication between the hardware and software components in a reconfigurable platform was presented at the 2006 Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) workshop in Yokohama, Japan.

• E. Simpson, P. Schaumont, "Offline Hardware/Software Authentication for Reconfigurable Platforms," Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems 2006 (CHES 06), Yokohama, Japan, October 2006. [presentation]

My Masters Thesis contains an expanded version of the offline HW/SW authentication scheme and its demonstration in a secure video system. An important addition to the HW/SW authentication scheme was the demonstration of a flexible means to provide physical end-point security in a remote offline device. Our implementation of a secure video system allows multiple parties to flexibly secure their content to a device's analog outputs.

• E. Simpson, 2007 Master of Science in Computer Engineering. Thesis: "Runtime Intellectual Property Protection on Programmable Platforms". [PDF]

I also completed the Elliptic Curve Cryptography hands-on portion of Dr. Patrick Schaumont's Secure Integration of Cryptographic Primitives presentation at the ECRYPT Summer School, Louvain-La-Neuve, June 2006, Belgium.

HW/SW Co-design and Optimization

Since security crosses both the hardware and software boundaries, another area of our work is in HW/SW co-design. Our group's HW/SW co-design experience enabled us to be a finalist at the MEMOCODE 2007 design competition.

• E. Simpson, P. Yu, P. Schaumont, S. Ahuja, S. Shukla, "VT Matrix Multiply Design for MEMOCODE 07," Fifth ACM-IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for Codesign (MEMOCODE'2007), Nice, France. [PDF]