A New Paradigm in Split Manufacturing: Lock the FEOL, Unlock at the BEOL

Split manufacturing was introduced as an effective countermeasure against hardware-level threats such as IP piracy, overbuilding, and insertion of hardware Trojans. Nevertheless, the security promise of split manufacturing has been challenged by various attacks, which exploit the well-known working principles of physical design tools to infer the missing BEOL interconnects. In this work, we advocate a new paradigm to enhance the security for split manufacturing. Based on Kerckhoff's principle, we protect the FEOL layout in a formal and secure manner, by embedding keys. These keys are purposefully implemented and routed through the BEOL in such a way that they become indecipherable to the state-of-the-art FEOL-centric attacks. We provide our secure physical design flow to the community. We also define the security of split manufacturing formally and provide the associated proofs. At the same time, our technique is competitive with current schemes in terms of layout overhead, especially for practical, large-scale designs (ITC'99 benchmarks).Comment: DATE 2019 (https://www.date-conference.com/conference/session/4.5

A Survey on Integrated Circuit Trojans

Traditionally, computer security has been associated with the software security, or the information-data security. Surprisingly, the hardware on which the software executes or the information stored-processed-transmitted has been assumed to be a trusted base of security. The main building blocks of any electronic device are Integrated circuits (ICs) which form the fabric of a computer system. Lately, the use of ICs has expanded from handheld calculators and personal computers (PCs) to smartphones, servers, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, this significant growth in the IC market created intense competition among IC vendors, leading to new trends in IC manufacturing. System-on-chip (SoC) design based on intellectual property (IP), a globally spread supply chain of production and distribution of ICs are the foremost of these trends. The emerging trends have resulted in many security and trust weaknesses and vulnerabilities, in computer systems. This includes Hardware Trojans attacks, side-channel attacks, Reverse-engineering, IP piracy, IC counterfeiting, micro probing, physical tampering, and acquisition of private or valuable assets by debugging and testing. IC security and trust vulnerabilities may cause loss of private information, modified/altered functions, which may cause a great economical hazard and big damage to society. Thus, it is crucial to examine the security and trust threats existing in the IC lifecycle and build defense mechanisms against IC Trojan threats. In this article, we examine the IC supply chain and define the possible IC Trojan threats for the parties involved. Then we survey the latest progress of research in the area of countermeasures against the IC Trojan attacks and discuss the challenges and expectations in this area. Keywords: IC supply chain, IC security, IP privacy, hardware trojans, IC trojans DOI: 10.7176/CEIS/12-2-01 Publication date: April 30th 202

Raise Your Game for Split Manufacturing: Restoring the True Functionality Through BEOL

Split manufacturing (SM) seeks to protect against piracy of intellectual property (IP) in chip designs. Here we propose a scheme to manipulate both placement and routing in an intertwined manner, thereby increasing the resilience of SM layouts. Key stages of our scheme are to (partially) randomize a design, place and route the erroneous netlist, and restore the original design by re-routing the BEOL. Based on state-of-the-art proximity attacks, we demonstrate that our scheme notably excels over the prior art (i.e., 0% correct connection rates). Our scheme induces controllable PPA overheads and lowers commercial cost (the latter by splitting at higher layers).Comment: Design Automation Conference 201

Hardware Trojan Detection on a PCB Through Differential Power Monitoring

There is a general consensus that contemporary electronics are at risk of cyber-attacks or malicious modifications, such as Hardware Trojans (HT). This makes it crucial to develop reliable countermeasures at both Integrated Circuit (IC) and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) levels. While HT detection at IC level has been widely studied in the past several years, there is still very limited research carried out to tackle HTs on PCBs. We propose a power analysis method for detecting HT components implanted on PCBs. An experimental setup, using a hardware prototype, is built and tested for verification of the methodology, taking process and temperature variations into account. The results confirm the ability to detect alien components on a PCB and provide directions for further research. The performance degradation of the original PCB due to the implementation of the proposed approach is negligible. The area overhead of the proposed method is small, related to the original PCB design, and consists of Sub Power Monitors of individual ICs on the PCB and Main Power Monitor for the overall power measurement of the PCB. To the best of our knowledge this research is the first to develop a PCB HT detection methodology using power analysis

Security Attack Models for Split Manufacturing of Integrated Circuits

Split manufacturing of integrated circuits reduces vulnerabilities introduced by an untrusted foundry by manufacturing only a part of design at an untrusted high-end foundry and the remaining part at a trusted low-end foundry. Unfortunately, a naïve spilt manufacturing alone does not ensure security. An attacker can use proximity attack to undermine the security offered by split manufacturing. However, this attack is applicable only to hierarchical designs. We propose a physical attack model for split manufacturing for industry-standard/ relevant flattened designs. Our attack uses heuristics of physical design tools, which outperform previous attack. We also develop a logic-aware physical attack considering logic redundancy, which identifies incorrect connections effectively. The effectiveness of proposed techniques is demonstrated by simulations on benchmark circuits. Our attack success rate is ~10× that of the proximity attack; our attack predicts 80% of the missing BEOL connections correctly, while the proximity attack predicts only 8% for flattened designs

HARDWARE ATTACK DETECTION AND PREVENTION FOR CHIP SECURITY

Hardware security is a serious emerging concern in chip designs and applications. Due to the globalization of the semiconductor design and fabrication process, integrated circuits (ICs, a.k.a. chips) are becoming increasingly vulnerable to passive and active hardware attacks. Passive attacks on chips result in secret information leaking while active attacks cause IC malfunction and catastrophic system failures. This thesis focuses on detection and prevention methods against active attacks, in particular, hardware Trojan (HT). Existing HT detection methods have limited capability to detect small-scale HTs and are further challenged by the increased process variation. We propose to use differential Cascade Voltage Switch Logic (DCVSL) method to detect small HTs and achieve a success rate of 66% to 98%. This work also presents different fault tolerant methods to handle the active attacks on symmetric-key cipher SIMON, which is a recent lightweight cipher. Simulation results show that our Even Parity Code SIMON consumes less area and power than double modular redundancy SIMON and Reversed-SIMON, but yields a higher fault -detection-failure rate as the number of concurrent faults increases. In addition, the emerging technology, memristor, is explored to protect SIMON from passive attacks. Simulation results indicate that the memristor-based SIMON has a unique power characteristic that adds new challenges on secrete key extraction