This week, the team finalized its decision on the system-on-chip (SoC) board for the project. After discussing with our liaisons, we selected the AMD Versal AI Edge Adaptive SoC XCVE2302 development board. Our liaisons recommended this board due to its emerging use at Lockheed Martin and the rest of the industry.

The SoCurity team put in a purchase request for the SoC board which has already been approved by the coach, Dr. Mishra. The purchase request is still awaiting approval from an IPPD staff member.

The SoCurity team was able to establish a HiPerGator environment with Ollama which will allow us to test many different LLMs for task 1. The team was also able to test pseudo timing attacks detected by a machine learning inference model with a University of Florida provided FPGA and a processor.

Next week, we plan on continuing to test task 1 LLMs in the HiPerGator environment. We are still awaiting feedback on our PDR report from Dr. Latorre. We also plan on conducting more inference model and timing attack testing. We plan on testing the LLMs and inference models with our SoC board selection in mind.

This week, the SoCurity team performed a dry run of the PDR presentation in front of three other teams and their coaches. The feedback we received was genuinely helpful, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to refine our delivery.

In our liaison meeting, we were able to confirm October 20th, 2026, as the date to travel down to Orlando for our PDR presentation. This timing also works well for the FLASH team, who is also sponsored by Lockheed Martin. We presented two potential SoC boards to our liaisons and discussed a few final questions before making a selection. We’re currently waiting to hear back from one liaison who was traveling during the meeting.

In our coach’s meeting, we were able to receive approval for our PDR architecture (above). Dr. Mishra also provided us with more avenues on how to conduct our research. He also wanted us to establish a threat model, a basic structure defining all constraints and assumptions of the hardware attack (timing side-channel attack). This will be useful when refining our PDR presentation.

Next week, we plan on refining our PDR report and our presentation based on the feedback we received this week. We also plan on testing a few inference models to determine their functionalities and limitations. Based on the answers we receive from the liaisons, we can also make a finalized SoC board selection. Finally, we also plan on setting up a HiPerGator environment to begin evaluating the LLM for task 1.

This week, our team was able to present our project plan to our liaisons through our project management tool, Trello. The Kanban board is clear and well-organized, making it easy for our liaisons to follow.

We also spoke with our liaisons on formalizing a date for our team to come down to the site and present our Preliminary Design Review (PDR). We are coordinating with the other team sponsored by Lockheed Martin, Flash, so that we can present on the same day. The earliest possible date that works for Lockheed Martin is October 20th, 2026.

The team has continued to do more research on several topics including the AI/ML inference models, timing side channel analysis testing, SoC board specifications, and LLM environment set ups.

Later in the week, the team was able to get a great portion of the PDR report draft complete. We were also able to complete the Preliminary Design Architecture; we are just waiting on our coach’s approval.

Next week, we plan on finishing the PDR report draft and PDR presentation slides. We also will conduct our PDR peer review event, where we will perform a mock presentation in front of other IPPD teams, receive feedback, and provide feedback on other presentations.

This week, our group was able to present our trade study to our liaisons. We received a lot of useful feedback on what capabilities the board that we purchase should have. Our group was also able to compose a draft of the Product Design Specification (PDS) document which will be necessary when preparing for our Preliminary Design Review (PDR).

Some of our team members were able to formally meet our executive sponsor, Raj Patel, in person! After representing Lockheed Martin at UF’s Career Showcase, Raj Patel was able to personally meet with us, provide resume suggestions, and answer any questions we had about our project.

Finally, during our meeting with our coach, Dr. Mishra, we learned many strategies for researching more on our topic. This included finding research papers sponsored by security conferences as well as GitHub repositories that may have similar tasks. He also gave us some ideas on how to experiment with certain subsections of our tasks, including how to test LLM’s and AI inference models.

Next week, we plan on finalizing dates with our liaisons to travel to our sponsor’s site in Orlando to present our PDR. We also plan on creating a project plan and a project roadmap for at least the rest of this semester. Finally, we also plan on starting a draft for our PDR report.

Welcome to our blog page! We will be working with Lockheed Martin on the LLM-Configured SoC with Real-Time Side-Channel Defense project! The project is composed of two tasks. The first task is to create natural language specification to allow an open-source large language model (LLM) to configure a system on chip (SoC). The second task is to deliver a secure-boot chain for an AI/ML inference model that can monitor for timing side-channel attacks on the SoC. Over the next two semesters, we will keep you updated with our progress on this page.

The SoCurity team consists of four computer engineering students — Braden Azis, Isabel Donner, Alejandro Velez, and Emily Zucker — alongside one electrical engineering student, Austin Lackovic.

By the week of September 7th, we met our coach, Dr. Mishra, our liaisons, Jennifer Fernandez and Grzegorz Cieslewski, and our executive sponsor, Raj Patel. In our meetings, they have provided clarification on our scope of work which allowed us to have a better understanding and plan for the future.

By next week, we plan on completing a draft of our Product Design Specifications (PDS). We also plan on presenting a trade study for hardware and software resources to our liaisons in our next meeting.