Live Sourcing Example: Anti-Tamper Engineers

Well, happy Friday! Welcome everybody to Shelly's Alley. Your power sourcing half hour. So I have some good news. I have a guest today, and I would like to start having more guests. So if you know anybody, or if you yourself want to come on the show and work on some recs and do some, you know, magic with sourcing, or just have a chat about, you know, business strategy, recruiting strategy, whatever, just join us. The URL to join the Zoom meeting live— you can obviously watch the broadcast, but to join the live Zoom meeting is srcn.co/zoom. So that is srcn.co, all lowercase, /zoom, and that will allow you to essentially, you know, join in and have a live chat, live conversation with us here on the show. Let me put this on the screen. There we go. There it is, srcn.co /zoom. All right, so who's here with us today? Uh, we just joined. I just let you into the meeting. Can you unmute yourself and, and say hi?

This is Dennis again. This week I guess I signed in as the corporate person.

The corporate person? All right.

Yeah, whenever I go on Zoom from my corporate account, I'm W or BW272C, so.

Oh, gotcha. So it's your corporate ID. I see what you're saying. All right. So what brings you today?

Well, I thought we might go through on finding an anti-tamper electronic electrical engineer that would mainly focus on the hardware side.

Okay. So we're looking for, um, let me grab a brand new browser window here and pull it up. There we go. So let's, uh, let's work on this one for, for a second here. I just allowed someone else into the meeting here, so, uh, why don't you introduce yourself? A brand new browser window here. Oh, we gotta mute yourself there. Okay, if you can manage that, um, try to— all right, unfortunately I had to mute them. Okay, sorry. So what was it you were saying? Uh, electrical engineer with what?

Uh, anti-tamper.

A-N-T-I-T-A-M-P-E-R. Yeah, well, hyphen is technically the way it's supposed to be. Anti-tamper. Okay. And you want an electrical engineer?

Correct.

So that says to me— I don't know enough about this, so, you know, educate me— but that says to me hardware. So you want, you want a hardware electrical engineer? It says this is software.

Right, right. There's, there's two of them. One, one side is software engineers who would, you know, be doing, you know, the various programs and locking down those programs. The other side would be a hardware individual who will be doing probably the system activities that are around, like say, electronic weapons system or communication system, or, you know, it could be a battle management system, anything like that that would be connected most of the time with the military, even though anti-tamper I think expands out a little bit more, but they're the ones that I think really, you know, got it going, so to speak.

Gotcha. So this is going to be the person working on the equipment. The hardware equipment makes itself— making it not, um, susceptible to, to basically external attacks, no matter what the software may be that's running the system, right? Like, say, like on a fighter jet or something like that. Okay, so they're an electrical engineer. Okay, um, is there an example of software, uh, or an anti-tamper product that we can use, like a name of something that we can use to start with, like, uh a brand name of an anti-tamper software mechanism that, that your people use?

Oh, really?

The one that I, I guess I found, uh, was maybe, uh, called Grammatech. G-R-A-M-M-A-T-E-C-H. Okay.

Grammatech. There we go.

All right.

And so do you feel like sometimes people mention this Grammatech on their profile?

Not, not really. At least from the standpoint of the hardware side, what I'm finding is, you know, I mean, you're lucky to get them to mention anti-tamper, to be quite honest.

Okay.

Uh, so, you know, I've been kind of broadening out. Okay, well, what else is around there? Well, cyber, cyber encryption.

Exactly.

Maybe even reverse engineering. You know, whoever's kind of locking down that software and the various tools. You know, FPGA, you know, would be one that's good because that's probably a main hardware that you want to lock down.

Okay.

You know, for, you know, for these various systems. And of course, when you talk about FPGA, you can get into all your standard software plus, you know, your C++.

Right, for listeners, FPGA is field programmable gate array, which is a hardware engineering term. So I just did anti-tamper and hardware, and I found this tamper-proof term as well as this anti-tamper technologies. So there's a little bit going on here, cryptographic as well. Let's see, Rambus DPA is probably a particular chip or some sort of set like that. So I like where this is going. Let's see, is there, has there ever been, do you know of a group like in maybe IEEE? Is there an association of some sort where these types of engineers share ideas and collaborate?

I, you know, I saw the— there was a couple I was looking at on IEEE, but I do not have that one real handy for you. There's something called HOSTS. It's called Hardware Oriented Security and Trust. Which was the first one that I was going to explore and to see where that got me. Okay.

I'm writing some of this stuff down here. So here's a few schema from IEEE. That's a, that's a really good place to start because let me see if I can show you. A couple of things here. So from the IEEE website, and all we did here is just a site search, essentially site:ieee.org, and we see listings of basically documents that are filed. So these are research papers and so on that, that are filed with the IEEE as, as an official society that sort of curates scientific papers around this technology. And the nice thing about that is that they're listing the authors for these right here. So we at the very least have the name. Now, this is probably not a good example because it's non-US-based, but it does show you evidence of what the IEEE, I guess, documents, right? So this is the paper which you would need to get. But more importantly for us, these are the authors. And when you click on an author's profile, you see other papers written by them along with where they work, if it's a university or laboratory or something something like that. So I would say let's go back here and see if we can find one of those other, or combinations of those other tools, like perhaps tamper-proofing and hardware. Is hardware usually hyphenated or not? I don't think it is, is it?

No, usually I haven't seen it that way, but okay, just want to make sure.

Tampa-proof hardware token. Okay, let's see. And then we can also narrow this down by conferences. So there's a couple of conferences in Louisiana, New Orleans, and one in Cambridge. And then there's, you know, the topic here. So there's your cryptography that you mentioned, there's security of data. But let me click on a couple of these just to see what we can find out. See if this is revealing anything at all. Here's the authors once again. Ah, both of these are in Germany. Okay. To avoid getting any more results that are from other countries, I'm going to go back to our original search and use the site command but it's taking me longer than expected to go back. But in this case, do USA. I think that might be the keyword. So I'm going to add both of these. So this is now a little bit of Boolean. We're going to use anti-tamper together with or tamper-proof. We don't need to use the and here because it is understood. So just leave it out. But here's your anti-tamper, tamper-proof, sorry. And then we did have hardware. Just to make sure we're not getting the software, although IEEE just generally is hardware related, but there are software sections to the IEEE and a couple of other organizations like that. So here we see one that looks DRM JTAG. I don't know what TAP or JTAG is, but that seems interesting. Our RAM, that's hardware. So let's open on that one and see what we can find there. So here's IntelliTech. Okay, that looks like a company, not a university. That's usually a good sign. All right, so there we have one lead. And okay, so there's another one. That's a school. Not as happy with that one as I am with the other one. So here's what we found. We have an individual. This person is pretty highly placed. They're the president of this company, but The company itself is interesting, so we can find other papers or publications by people at that company to find other authors there. Or there's a couple of other techniques that we can use now that we have this— oops, I think I just hit the wrong button and accidentally stopped sharing. Now that we have this, uh, this lead, if you will, right, it is to look for documents that are citing this research. Does that make sense? You follow what I'm saying?

Yes.

So citations, basically, right? And there are a number of publications that are— not publications, I should say websites that curate these types of publications that reference citations of other authors and so on with regard to scientific and academic papers. Let's take a look at some of those. Let's see, we're going to open up, um, try Sightseer. By the way, if you're curious what we're doing here, this is essentially part of what's called the deep web. So deep web is defined as content that is not easily indexable by search engines, and there can be a number of reasons why that content is not indexable. For example, as I showed you on the IEEE website just a moment ago, one of those reasons is that the document itself has to be downloaded and to download the document you have to be a member. So to show you here, the indexable content is this, the plain text, right? So Google can see this, but Google doesn't have the right to download the actual PDFs themselves, or sometimes it does, but it doesn't choose to because the PDFs are very large. And a little-known fact is that search engines like Google and Bing, have a limit to how many lines of text they index in their crawls. So if a PDF document is longer than that, any text that's beneath that line cutoff point is not indexed, therefore it's not findable. Again, another reason why it goes into the deep web. Let me click on this PDF to see if I can actually download it. It looks like I could. Nope, I have to sign in. Okay, so even though there's an icon, I have to sign in. And even though it may be free, I do have to have an account. So Google doesn't do it, which means Google cannot read this PDF, but it reads the other part. So we got here, and that's close enough. Now we need to find kind of the, you know, the next level, right? And so we're looking at some of the sites that have publications. One of my favorite— there's, there's 3 that I want to talk about: DOAJ, Semantic Scholar, and CiteULike. One of my favorite ones is the DOAJ because It is peer-reviewed journals. So in other words, this is where people who write for the official society papers— and peer-reviewed basically means that people that are authorities have replicated or have approved that paper, have— they can confirm that the results are legit. Or in other words, it's kind of like reference checked. It's like reference checking a scientific paper. And here you can see both journals and articles. An article is not necessarily a paper, but still both of these are, are useful to us. So here we can look at the publisher and the title and a few other things. In this case, let's see if we can find CJ Clark as a publisher, perhaps. Nope. Now, what was the name of his company? It was Intelitech. Let's try Intelitech as the publisher in the event that the company— although seldom that happens. Usually the scientists themselves, the researcher, the hardware engineer, they're the ones that are named as opposed to the organization to which they belong. But, um, let's try something a little bit different here and see if we can find Intelitech? Nope. Okay, that's all right. So not, not a good hit here, but let's go to one of the others. So that's DOJ. We'll come back to that in a minute. The other one is CiteULike, and that's the second one, I think, second one that I mentioned. What I like about that one in particular is that it allows you to name a person and find where that person is being cited by other people in other papers. For example, it looks like I'm not able to get to that at the moment. That's okay. Let's go to the third one. What's that?

Is it spelled with the C instead of the S?

Oh, did I misspell it?

You have C there. I mean, it still says cite, but I didn't know if it's supposed to be S.

Oh, it's cite as in citation.

Yeah. Okay, site isn't cited.

That, that is correct. It could be the website's gone or down or whatever. Here's Semantic Scholar, which is the other one. Let's try, um, IntelliTech. Pardon my laziness here, I'd rather not retype it, so I'll just copy it. IntelliTech. Ah, look, look at that, we've got a bunch now. 9 results from IntelliTech. Remote sensing. Software, large-scale servo motor control system. This doesn't seem like it's related, and it's Das IntelliTech, which seems like it's a different company. So now let's try CJ Clark and see if we can find that. Oh, you know what? That's a lot. It may help to put CJ Clark in quotations. And now let's see if we can go in and look by author. Okay, yep, let's do author because that's— there we go, 10 results. That's a little bit more reasonable, right? Uh, looks like we have medical papers here. Okay, no worries. Let's go back and try something else. So what else is mentioned in here? Integrated circuits, boundary scan, FPGA. There you go. Logic testing, digital rights. What else? Electronics fault. Wow, I'm really not seeing a whole lot in here about like the protection of this, you know, the, the, the, um, the anti-tamper, you know. Doesn't say a whole lot about that. I wonder why. What did we originally look for? We looked for anti-tamper Rewritable— yeah, photonic platform anti-temp. That's what we found. Do you know what JTAG or TAP is? Oh no, I don't, to be honest, because they mentioned this hardware-oriented security and trust. Yeah, let's take a look at that. We're going to go to DOAJ for that, and nothing. And then we'll go to Semantic Scholar for that. And see what we get. Okay, there we go. That's interesting. Asian hardware. Okay, let's see if we can find a particular journal. Oh wow, there's actually a journal called Host. Let's see what that's like. Look at that, and it's back to the IEEE, which means we were in the right place. But here we go. Hardware-oriented security and trust, McLean, Virginia, one citation. And again, it's the same people, darn it. Computer Security Foundation Symposium, network management. Nope. I like this one, but it doesn't seem related. It's IP trust. So let's go back to That's too old, 2014. I shouldn't say that. I mean, there could still be people that, you know, come up that are relevant, but see if we can find something a little bit more recent. Well, there's the same one that came up again. Let's have a look and see. Statically typed crypto. Statically typed seems like it might be on, on the microchip, right? Right, okay, maybe. Let's see, whatever.

It's an ASIC chip, could be ASIC too, I guess.

ASIC or FPGA.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's programmed into the chip and you can't change it, but, um, you know, the FPGA certainly can change. So when you say static, kind of to me says it may be, you know, fixed, that you cannot adapt it.

You cannot, right. Yeah, so we can go back and maybe try FPGA on the search, but what I wanted to show you ultimately was the end result is these people here that are being quoted, right? So there's 3, I guess, citations. One of them is probably the lead author, but there it shows 4 actually. Sorry, there was one hidden there. It shows 4 authors here. Let's go to one of those and see. What we can find on the author's page. Taking a minute to load. Okay, while we're doing that, on the right-hand side, let me draw your attention to something else. You see there's 18 citations. This is what I wanted to get ultimately with CiteULike. There's one highly influential citation, which means that individual is quoted a lot, and then there's a few background and methods. So basically, in the scientific research or in the paper, paper arena, these are like, I base this research on research previously done by these 6 people, or I use the same method as methods used by these 4 people. So you can go to each of those and identify an additional set of authors. Oh, wow, it's taking a really long time. All right, well.

So let's say, you know, you find a person here, okay, one of these authors, then do you as a matter of practice then go back into the company that he's working with or the school? And then like, like say I'm probably looking in a neighborhood of maybe 4 to 8 years overall experience, okay, on these. I have several of them. That's why I chose them.

Okay.

Right. And so, so the next step would be— and obviously, you know, someone's writing a paper, they're probably not going to be the right way.

In the event of CJ Clark, who's the CEO, you're absolutely right. So what we found here was a company that could lead us to the right people. And then what we found with the other one were authors that may be the lower level— I don't want to say lower level— they may be the, um, the individuals that actually do the work, right? But even going back to CJ Clark, there is a list of co-authors, in fact quite a few of them. And so these may very well be people that are the scientists themselves. So yeah, there's a few things you can do. You could track them down individually and find out their companies and sort of branch out from there. It's a little bit of a I want to say a little bit of a shot in the dark because we don't know what these people do just by looking at their profiles here, right? But let's say we found this Mike Ricchetti. Let's see if we can find any information about them. There we go. AMD. Perfect. So that's a directly related company. So now we have design engineer at AMD. It's possible that he is— we don't know a lot about him, but it's possible based on the papers that he has written that he is, you know, involved in hardware design for, um, what was that called again? You said anti— anti-tamper, right? So now we have a name, right? Now you have a name and you have a company and you have a location. It's not that difficult to go from here to a couple of things you could do. You could literally just Google them right? So Mike Richter, AMD, Boxborough. Chances are pretty good that you'll find other papers or, um, that you'll find, um, some social media profile or something like that. So here's— oh, you know what, I should have put this in quotation marks, and I failed to do that again. When you're using names as search words, you probably want to do that because the, the Mike and the Ricchetti need to appear together. So here's a couple— self test and embed test. It doesn't have box for— oh, did I spell it anyway? All right, so here's a PDF. I'm gonna go ahead and download it and see what we can get from it. That's one way to do it. Um, looks like he went to IntelliTech. Let's see if we can just find Mike Ricchetti alone, just the name. Oh, here's another scientific research place. There's a Facebook one, may not be the same one, that may be a common name. Of course, here's LinkedIn. You can always revert back to that, but sometimes these people are not on LinkedIn and the Mike Ricchetti that's on LinkedIn is not the same as the hardware engineer that we're trying to find. So, you know, again, it could be— so there's DFT Architect. That's not it. It's hard to tell which of these it might be. And look, there's not a lot of information on their profile, so that's kind of a dead end. That's all right. This one, IntelliTech, huh? Okay, so that's the PDF. Let's see what we can do. No. All right, so this is the company. Let's use the site command on the company's website and see if we can essentially take a peek inside of their website to find all these documents. Maybe we can do a search for file type. So here's another command that you can use in the search box is to use the file type command. And see if there's any PDF documents amongst those pages. And sure enough, there is that page there, which I think is the same one we clicked on before. Here's that JTAG again. See if I can grab this one.

I'm just drawing a blank on what that might be.

Wish I could open— there's FIFPGA. I wish I can open that one. It keeps saying privacy error. You know what, let me ignore the privacy error, see if it opens it. Yep, it did. Okay, so I just ignored the privacy error and it downloaded the PDF document in both cases. So here's the JTAG one. CJ Clark. There you go, we know him. Let's see if there's other people being mentioned here. So when I see a paper like this, I'm looking for the section that might have citations or references. Just keep scrolling down until we see that. It may sometimes be at the very end.

I put something in the Zoom chat you might like.

Oh, okay. Hey Glenn, this looks like a PowerPoint actually, um, rather than a PDF. So it was, it was once a PowerPoint. Let's take a look at the chat real quick. All right, good idea. So then just— I don't know if you guys can see the chat, but Glenn just gave us another idea. Here's the other place, the BLP. So this is a library again, and once again doing kind of like a reference checking. So you can find there's Mike Ricchetti. So these guys, so obviously Mike now used to work at AMD, has now left, and is now with this guy at this company, right? But then there's some other people we might find here. So you've got the names, you can then find their contact information. There's other ways we can do that. For example, if we know Mike Ricchetti is the target name, and I believe we know that they are in— what was that? Boxborough? Or at least that's where he was before. We can try using something like True People Search, for example, and look for Mike Ricchetti. And Boxborough, there we go. Although he might have moved, um, to where— wherever that other company is. It looks— this is one of the things I don't like about True People Search. It's a great search engine for contact information, but I specifically said Boxborough, yet there's Ohio, Colorado— I mean, everything but, right? Of course, we don't know if this individual actually moved. Where is this, um, Intelli— uh, what was the name of that company? Where is that other company located?

Over New Hampshire, a little bit north of Boxborough, which is that Intelli—

whatever it's called. Okay, so we could try New Hampshire.

That's what I saw, one that said New Hampshire. On that list when we were scrolling down there, down there, there's this one.

Yeah, the Nashua is close.

There we go.

Expert on New Hampshire by any sense of the means.

So we have a couple phone numbers, no email address, but that's okay. Finding email addresses is going to be a little bit easier because for one, you could guess michael.ricchetti@amd.com or michael.ricchetti@ Intelli— I'm so sorry, I keep forgetting the name of that company. Intelli— uh, IntelliTech. IntelliTech, right? So guessing it is one avenue, or you can just simply use any one of the email lookup systems, put in Michael Ricchetti in Nashua, you know, like, um, in, in Kendo or any of those, Swordfish, etc., and get maybe an email address. So You asked how do we get to this person? So that's, that's one way that we get to them. Then there's the other technique that Glen just introduced or suggested, which is to use the inurl: command. And that is indicating to us that we want the search engine to return only websites where in the address of the website, the URL, the locator is the word research. And also somewhere on the page is the word author along with the keywords ASIC or FPGA, which are the two keywords that you talked about earlier, and the other two keywords that we had talked about, anti-tamper and tamper-proof. So the bar in between these is the same as the or. In other words, you could do this just as well as what Glen suggests, but you run the risk of running out of keywords because there's a limit of 32 keywords. For some reason, Google in its infinite wisdom has decided that the or is a keyword as well as a command, therefore it counts against you in the total count. So that's one reason that we use the pipe symbol. If you're looking for it on your keyboard, it's above the Enter key. And the other reason is it reduces the amount of typing. You don't have to have double quotes, reduces the risk of you having a single quote instead of a double quote, and it also is faster. So yeah, it's, you know, I'm that lazy. It's just faster to type one stroke. So here we have the other two keywords as ASIC and FPGA. Glen put these in quotation marks to force their inclusion because otherwise they may be omitted. And I'm going to show you one other thing you can do instead of this, or in addition to this, to force their inclusion. So let's go ahead and hit search on that. And if you're getting results without the ASIC or FPGA, You'll know that because it shows a little message that says, um, these words were included. You can click to include those words, which essentially wraps them in quotation marks, or you can go up here to Tools and force their inclusion by going to Verbatim. What Verbatim does is it tells Google to look for exactly what you typed, including all the terms that you typed. And not trying to spell check or suggest or whatever, and you'll get the raw data, the raw results.

Well, frankly, the reason I put it in quotes was because I was afraid it was going to give me other acronyms similarly spelled but meaning something different.

Yes, and so it— that also is eliminated with verbatim. So, you know, again, the same, the same principle applies whether you're eliminating it or whether you're eliminating the possibility of synonyms or eliminating the possibility of it being omitted completely, which does happen— either of those, both of those are solved by using the quotation marks. Also, both of those are solved by forcing verbatim. You still have one more thing you need to do, which is to repeat the search with the omitted results included. And this now turns off what's called site compression, where Google clusters all of the results from the same website Imagine IEEE, for example, into one most likely result, which means if there's 20 results from IEEE, it only shows you one and you don't want that because you want to see all of them. So we turned that off as well. So we're on verbatim and repeated the search with the omitted results. Whether or not you use quotation marks is, is also an option. And here we have a bunch of other papers of people that are talking about anti-tamper-proof— anti-tamper or tamper-proof, sorry— in, in the hardware concept. Once again, you know, find the article, find the author, then search for the author. Make sense?

Uh, yes.

Lots of papers here.

Okay, so that's one of the techniques that we call Yeah, it's very technical and very, very popular. I know in St. Louis, we've got a whole, like, a center just for anti-tamper that we're working across the product lines that we have for all of Boeing. So it's a big area. You can read some of the things that's going on with the military and everything. It's pretty huge.

Yeah, security is a big thing. I was on site at a base that I can't mention, um, that has a lot of high-level security equipment in it that may or may not fly in the air. And the day that I was there working with this group, um, was the day that the drone was shot down in China, and that drone had the experimental anti-radar paint on it.

That would be interesting. I think you froze for some reason.

I don't hear him either.

Do you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah.

Okay. I was just thinking if Synopsys, where that Mike Ricchetti is now, is interesting to you, I just put in the, uh, okay, chat the link to the whole leadership team. There's some other interesting people there.

Okay. Got it.

And for those of you watching on Facebook, I will put those same links in the chat there in case you're curious about finding the guy we were talking about. But I do like that method of following the names to see what other names, not just co-authors, but in this case colleagues.

Yeah, and that's, you know, that is what takes the time. And sometimes, you know, when you have a lot of recs that are very, you know, anti-tamper, you know, is maybe one of my easier ones right now, to be quite honest. And some of the other ones that we had for like, you know, the system on the chip and then the radome engineers that were very senior, you know, type people. But definitely, you know, there's a couple sites that he mentioned there that really wasn't familiar with that I can, uh, you know, do some exploring, um, to see what they show, uh, and then come up with maybe some— you know, I've got a feel that most of these people, or a lot of these people, I would think would be connected with the IEE. He's back! He's back! Okay.

Yeah, yeah, I was just about to tell a story about some top secret government thing and my internet went out. I wonder why that happened. Sorry about that, guys. Well, I don't know if you heard any of it, but it's, you know, we're past the time here. So I hope you got some value out of this and this encourages other folks to join us for future, you know, jam sessions on sourcing stuff.

Yes, thank you. Good.

Yeah. How do we do it? You find some useful stuff?

Can you hear me okay, or—

Yes.

Okay, I'm sorry, I was saying I was on mute. Uh, no, no, that's good. Like I said, it did give me some ideas of some different ways that I can approach some new sites that I really wasn't that familiar with, that I can go into. And to know that while still following the breadcrumbs, so to speak, away from these authors is probably a very good way that I'm gonna find some of these people and just kind of have the patience.

Yeah.

Hang in there and keep digging.

Pull the thread, you know, pull the thread a little bit. It's just, it's a chain effect. And these are hard to find people, so it's worth it. Now, if this was, if this was a much more common type of role, you know, there's other ways that we could do it, but they're not on LinkedIn and they're typically, you know, they have secret clearance and all that. So this is a good way to go and dig through and find them. And you know what, when you find them, you're going to be talking to people that not a lot of recruiters are talking to. So it's, it's a distinctive advantage. Yeah. Thanks for joining us today. Hey, Glenn, sorry.

I was going to encourage you to connect to as many of these people though, that you can find on LinkedIn. Like we did find Mike Righetti, for example, because that will add a lot of credibility when you later go after other people in their circle and they see you're already first degree with some of the folks they respect.

Okay, excellent point, excellent point for sure. Well, thanks Glenn for your contributions and thanks for participating today. Uh, see you guys on, uh, next Shelly's Alley.

Thanks a lot.

Bye everybody.