IIT-Guwahati team develops cyber attack shield

GUWAHATI: A team of researchers from IIT-Guwahati, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, have developed an algorithm that protects digital data from cyber attacks and also encrypts sensitive healthcare data that is transmitted via the internet.
The post-quantum cryptography-based encryption algorithms and the indigenous soft IPs can be integrated into Systems-on-Chip (SoC) to protect the nation’s digital data from cyber attacks, an IIT-G spokesperson said on Wednesday. He added that these algorithms and IPs would enable critical data, such as national security data and citizen information, to be under an unbreakable lock-and-key.
The research has been recently published in the proceedings of IEEE International Conference Radioelektronika and also received an award for being the third-best paper. The team is led by Dr Gaurav Trivedi, associate professor of electronics and electrical engineering at IIT-G, and has Srinivasan Krishnaswamy, assistant professor from his department, Zdenek Nemec and Jan Pidanic from the University of Pardubice. The team also consists of research scholars Bikram Paul, Uddipana Dowerah, Tarun Kumar Yadav, Balbir Singh, Abhishek Agrawal, Meenali Janveja, and Souradip Pal from IIT-G.
“It has become the need of the hour to design new encryption schemes that can resist attacks on both quantum computers and classical computer,” Trivedi said. He added that this need gave rise to a new field of research called Post-Quantum Cryptography and many teams, including the one from IIT-G, have been working on developing algorithms to secure data from attacks by advanced computers.
Lauding the efforts, IIT-G director TG. Sitharam, said, “Both these electronic devices are the results of the joint efforts of IIT Guwahati and the University of Pardubice with whom we have had successful collaboration for the past nine years. These devices are in-line with India’s vision of self-reliance (Atmanirbhar) and independence from foreign technology.”
The IIT-G team has also worked towards enhancing data security in the healthcare sector that is increasingly using the Internet-of-Things module to cater to the needs of the country. IoT in healthcare aids in real-time diagnosis of diseases by keeping a patient digitally connected to a medical expert 24x7, thus avoiding visits and admissions in the hospital.