Digital IC Fingerprinting

Motivation and Background

Hardware manufacturers are increasingly outsourcing their IC fabrication work overseas due to much lower costs. This poses a significant security risk for ICs used for critical military and business applications. Attackers can exploit this loss of control to substitute Trojan ICs for genuine ones or insert a Trojan circuit into the design or mask used for fabrication.

Local, high-end, trusted facilities are economically unviable and there is a need for a solution to safely allow the use of outside fabrication facilities. The existing IC authentication tools and techniques are cumbersome, destructive to the IC, and do not provide sufficient protection.

Our Research

We show that a technique borrowed from side-channel cryptanalysis can be used to mitigate this problem. Our approach uses noise modeling, to construct a "Fingerpint" for an IC family utilizing side-channel information such as power/temperature/electromagnetic (EM) profiles. These fingerprints can be developed using a few ICs from a batch and only these ICs would have to be invasively tested to ensure that they were all authentic. The remaining ICs are verified using statistical tests against the "Fingerprint".

Publications

Dakshi Agrawal, Selcuk Baktir, Deniz Karakoyunlu, Pankaj Rohatgi, Berk Sunar.Trojan Detection Using IC Fingerprinting. To appear in Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'07).

Dakshi Agrawal, Selcuk Baktir, Deniz Karakoyunlu, Pankaj Rohatgi, Berk Sunar.Trojan Detection Using IC Fingerprinting. IBM Research Report, RC24110, 2006.

Relevant Links

DRAFT TRUST Program Information

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Last modified: Feb 02, 2007, 18:46 EST