CAREER: Proactive Defense Methods for Chip Integrity and Security

University Of New Hampshire, Durham NH

Investigators

Abstract

Insecure chips threaten homeland security and citizen safety, especially in critical applications in the military, government, health care, and transportation. Unlike software, once an integrated circuit is fabricated, chips cannot be patched if a security vulnerability is identified. To overcome this problem, this project develops countermeasures against attacks that can be incorporated at the chip design phase. To increase interest in cybersecurity amongst K-12 and university students, the PI co-organizes a K-12 outreach program at the PI's university and mentors undergraduate research teams for international hardware security competitions. The PI continues her working relationship with the New Hampshire Science Teachers Association to recruit students from underrepresented groups and increase the ratio of female to male students in her department. Security threats, such as hardware intellectual property (IP) piracy, hardware Trojan, and side-channel attacks, reinforce increasing hardware integrity and trust concerns. Instead of relying on extensive testing and authentication after chips are fabricated, this project develops proactive defense methods to resist attacks at the design phase. The investigated methods will significantly increase the difficulty for attackers to bypass the applied countermeasure and sabotage the original chip design. To protect IP cores from reverse engineering and IP piracy attacks, this project investigates a dynamically-deflective obfuscation method. This project also explores an interlocked dynamic hardening method to protect Networks-on-Chip from bandwidth depletion and information leaking. A unified countermeasure framework for cipher gate-level implementation will be developed to tackle new attacks using a combination of fault attacks and side-channel attacks.