Dr. Naghmeh Karimi's group (SECRETS Lab members) along with their collaborators in Secure-IC and Paris Telecom won the Best Hardware Demo Award at the 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) Conference, a flagship hardware Security Conference held recently in San Jose, California.

The team presented "COOL PUF: A Temperature Resilient PUF Assuring Reliability". This hardware security primitive has been designed such that it remains resilient even when the temperature changes drastically, so it is a COOL entity.

PUFs, or physical unclonable functions, are one of the main hardware primitives that provide security. They are mainly used in key generation for cryptographic modules, device authentication, and device metering schemes to prevent illegitimate overproductions of Integrated Circuits (IC) and IC piracy by malicious intruders.