Jackson Ermi

Bio

I am a M.S. student in the Intelligent Systems Engineering Department at Indiana University. My research focuses on studying the effects that harmful, ionzing radiation can have on microelectronics for use in extreme environments. Over the past two years I have investigated how total ionizing dose (TID) can degrade specific emitter identification (SEI) classifiers. SEI is an RF communications security protocol that leverages innate, hardware imperfections introduced during the manufacturing process to identify and authenticate different transmitters. This protocol has drawn much interest for security applications over the past two decades due to its passive implementation and reliability against spoofing.

However, our recent work has shown potential vulnerability to this classifier when exposed to TID. These effects can introduce shifts to an emitters 'fingerprint' when transmitting and potentially make it more difficult for classifiers trained on pre-rad profiles to accurately identify radios. This provides an additional challenge for those seeking to leverage SEI in space applications or other extreme environments. 

Research

Total Ionizing Dose Effects on Specific Emitter Identifcation of Software Defined Radios

Previously, we studied the effects of TID on Long-Short term Memoery (LSTM) based SEI classifiers. Testing was conducted with a CO-60 source producing high energy gamma rays at Radiation Test Solutions (RTS). Our work established a reliability concern when using SEI in radiation-rich environments. Results suggested that classification accuracy degradation was being driven by drifts in the clock network. However, as a systems test, determining contribution conclusively was difficult, this is where the following experiment fits in. 

Examination of Device Level Contribution to TID-Induced Degradation in SEI Classifiers

Most recently we conducted a TID experiment at Vanderbilt's Institute for Space and Defense Electronics (ISDE) using their 10 keV Xray source to isolate components in order to build a better understanding of device level contribution to SEI classification. We irradiated 6 B200minis, 3 radiois had their PGAs decapsulated and 3 had their RFICs decapsulated.  Analysis of our results is still currently being conducted.