Spectroscopic investigations, DFT computations and other molecular properties of 2,4-dimethylbenzoic acid

The molecular vibrations of 2,4-dimethylbenzoicacid (DMBA) have been investigated by recording Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and FT-Raman spectroscopy. The complete vibrational assignment and analysis of the fundamental modes of the compound have been carried out using the experimental data and quantum chemical studies from DFT calculations employing MPW1PW91 and B3LYP methods employing 6-311++G(d,p) basis set. The 1H and 13C NMR chemical shifts have been calculated with the GIAO method using the optimized parameters obtained from B3LYP/6-311+G(d,p) method. Important thermodynamic properties and electronic properties have been calculated. Low value of HOMO-LUMO energy gap suggests the possibility of intramolecular charge transfer in the molecule. Furthermore, the first hyperpolarizability and total dipole moment of the molecule have been calculated

Vibrational spectroscopic investigations, DFT computations, nonlinear optical and other molecular properties of 3-bromo-5-fluorobenzonitrile

The FTIR and FT-Raman spectra of 3-bromo-5-fluorobenzonitrile (BFBN) have been recorded in the regions 4000-400 cm-1 and 3500-400 cm-1, respectively. Utilizing the observed FT-Raman and FTIR data, a complete vibrational assignment and analysis of the fundamental modes of the compound have been carried out and subsequently confirmed by total energy distribution (TEDs). In the calculations performed to determine the optimum molecular geometry, harmonic vibrational frequencies, infrared intensities and Raman scattering activities, the density functional theory (DFT/B3LYP) method with 6-31+G(d,p) and 6-311++G(d,p) basis sets has been used. The results have been compared with the experimental values. The difference between the observed and scaled wavenumber values of most of the vibrational modes is very small. The NLO properties such as polarizability and first hyperpolarizability of the molecule have been calculated. The effects of frontier orbitals, HOMO and LUMO and the transition of electron density transfer have been discussed. The UV-Vis spectrum has been done which confirms the charge transfer of BFBN. The chemical interpretation of hyperconjugative interactions and charge delocalization has been analyzed using natural bond orbital (NBO) analysis

FuncTeller: How Well Does eFPGA Hide Functionality?

Hardware intellectual property (IP) piracy is an emerging threat to the global supply chain. Correspondingly, various countermeasures aim to protect hardware IPs, such as logic locking, camouflaging, and split manufacturing. However, these countermeasures cannot always guarantee IP security. A malicious attacker can access the layout/netlist of the hardware IP protected by these countermeasures and further retrieve the design. To eliminate/bypass these vulnerabilities, a recent approach redacts the design's IP to an embedded field-programmable gate array (eFPGA), disabling the attacker's access to the layout/netlist. eFPGAs can be programmed with arbitrary functionality. Without the bitstream, the attacker cannot recover the functionality of the protected IP. Consequently, state-of-the-art attacks are inapplicable to pirate the redacted hardware IP. In this paper, we challenge the assumed security of eFPGA-based redaction. We present an attack to retrieve the hardware IP with only black-box access to a programmed eFPGA. We observe the effect of modern electronic design automation (EDA) tools on practical hardware circuits and leverage the observation to guide our attack. Thus, our proposed method FuncTeller selects minterms to query, recovering the circuit function within a reasonable time. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FuncTeller on multiple circuits, including academic benchmark circuits, Stanford MIPS processor, IBEX processor, Common Evaluation Platform GPS, and Cybersecurity Awareness Worldwide competition circuits. Our results show that FuncTeller achieves an average accuracy greater than 85% over these tested circuits retrieving the design's functionality.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the 32st USENIX Security Symposium, 202

PSOFuzz: Fuzzing Processors with Particle Swarm Optimization

Hardware security vulnerabilities in computing systems compromise the security defenses of not only the hardware but also the software running on it. Recent research has shown that hardware fuzzing is a promising technique to efficiently detect such vulnerabilities in large-scale designs such as modern processors. However, the current fuzzing techniques do not adjust their strategies dynamically toward faster and higher design space exploration, resulting in slow vulnerability detection, evident through their low design coverage. To address this problem, we propose PSOFuzz, which uses particle swarm optimization (PSO) to schedule the mutation operators and to generate initial input programs dynamically with the objective of detecting vulnerabilities quickly. Unlike traditional PSO, which finds a single optimal solution, we use a modified PSO that dynamically computes the optimal solution for selecting mutation operators required to explore new design regions in hardware. We also address the challenge of inefficient initial seed generation by employing PSO-based seed generation. Including these optimizations, our final formulation outperforms fuzzers without PSO. Experiments show that PSOFuzz achieves up to 15.25$\times$ speedup for vulnerability detection and up to 2.22$\times$ speedup for coverage compared to the state-of-the-art simulation-based hardware fuzzer.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the ICCAD, 202

Testing the Trustworthiness of IC Testing: An Oracle-less Attack on IC Camouflaging

Test of integrated circuits (ICs) is essential to ensure their quality; the test is meant to prevent defective and out-of-spec ICs from entering into the supply chain. The test is conducted by comparing the observed IC output with the expected test responses for a set of test patterns; the test patterns are generated using automatic test pattern generation algorithms. Existing test-pattern generation algorithms aim to achieve higher fault coverage at lower test costs. In an attempt to reduce the size of test data, these algorithms reveal the maximum information about the internal circuit structure. This is realized through sensitizing the internal nets to the outputs as much as possible, unintentionally leaking the secrets embedded in the circuit as well. In this paper, we present HackTest, an attack that extracts secret information generated in the test data, even if the test data does not explicitly contain the secret. HackTest can break the existing intellectual property (IP) protection techniques, such as camouflaging, within two minutes for our benchmarks using only the camouflaged layout and the test data. HackTest applies to all existing camouflaged gate-selection techniques and is successful even in the presence of state-of-the-art test infrastructure, i.e. test data compression circuits. Our attack necessitates that the IC test data generation algorithms be reinforced with security. We also discuss potential countermeasures to prevent HackTest

Molecular geometry, spectroscopic and NLO studies of 1-(chloromethyl)-4-fluorobenzene – A DFT study

The vibrational spectra of 1-(chloromethyl)-4-fluorobenzene have been studied in the 4000 - 400 cm-1 and 3500 - 50 cm-1 range, by FTIR and FT-Raman, respectively. In this work, structural analysis and vibrational frequencies are performed utilizing the GAUSSIAN 09W program with DFT/B3LYP strategy with basis set 6-311++G (d, p). Least differences are noted between the measured and scaled wavenumbers. The molecular vibrational assignments are confirmed by the PED (potential energy distribution) percentage. Frontier molecular orbital, natural bond orbital and Mullikan charge examinations are employed to explain the reason for intra and intermolecular charge exchange of the molecule. Reactive sites and chemical shifts are investigated by molecular electrostatic potential map and nuclear magnetic resonance analysis. Besides, the polarizability, the first hyperpolarizability, and total dipole moment of the molecule have been computed for describing its NLO activity

Security Analysis of Anti-SAT

Logic encryption protects integrated circuits (ICs) against intellectual property (IP) piracy and over- building attacks by encrypting the IC with a key. A Boolean satisfiability (SAT) based attack breaks all existing logic encryption technique within few hours. Recently, a defense mechanism known as Anti-SAT was presented that protects against SAT attack, by rendering the SAT-attack effort exponential in terms of the number of key gates. In this paper, we highlight the vulnerabilities of Anti-SAT and propose signal probability skew (SPS) attack against Anti-SAT block. SPS attack leverages the structural traces in Anti-SAT block to identify and isolate Anti-SAT block. The attack is 100% successful on all variants of Anti-SAT block. SPS attack is scalable to large circuits, as it breaks circuits with up to 22K gates within two minutes

Is Split Manufacturing Secure?

Abstract-Split manufacturing of integrated circuits (IC) is being investigated as a way to simultaneously alleviate the cost of owning a trusted foundry and eliminate the security risks associated with outsourcing IC fabrication. In split manufacturing, a design house (with a low-end, in-house, trusted foundry) fabricates the Front End Of Line (FEOL) layers (transistors and lower metal layers) in advanced technology nodes at an untrusted high-end foundry. The Back End Of Line (BEOL) layers (higher metal layers) are then fabricated at the design house's trusted low-end foundry. Split manufacturing is considered secure (prevents reverse engineering and IC piracy) as it hides the BEOL connections from an attacker in the FEOL foundry. We show that an attacker in the FEOL foundry can exploit the heuristics used in typical floorplanning, placement, and routing tools to bypass the security afforded by straightforward split manufacturing. We developed an attack where an attacker in the FEOL foundry can connect 96% of the missing BEOL connections correctly. To overcome this security vulnerability in split manufacturing, we developed a fault analysis-based defense. This defense improves the security of split manufacturing by deceiving the FEOL attacker into making wrong connections

A Red Team/Blue Team Assessment of Functional Analysis Methods for Malicious Circuit Identification

Recent advances in hardware security have led to the development of FANCI (Functional Analysis for Nearly-Unused Circuit Identification), an analysis tool that identifies stealthy, malicious circuits within hardware designs that can perform malicious backdoor behavior. Evaluations of such tools against benchmarks and academic attacks are not always equivalent to the dynamic attack scenarios that can arise in the real world. For this reason, we apply a red team/blue team approach to stress-test FANCI's abilities to efficiently detect malicious backdoor circuits within hardware designs. In the Embedded Systems Challenge (ESC) 2013, teams from research groups from multiple continents created designs with malicious backdoors hidden in them as part of a red team effort to circumvent FANCI. Notably, these backdoors were not placed into a priori known designs. The red team was allowed to create arbitrary, unspecified designs. Two interesting results came out of this effort. The first was that FANCI was surprisingly resilient to this wide variety of attacks and was not circumvented by any of the stealthy backdoors created by the red teams. The second result is that frequent-action backdoors, which are backdoors that are not made stealthy, were often successful. These results emphasize the importance of combining FANCI with a reasonable degree of validation testing. The blue team efforts also exposed some aspects of the FANCI prototype that make analysis time-consuming in some cases, which motivates further development of the prototype in the future