PRECISE Seminar: Who Stole my (Semiconductor) Chip?

For economic reasons, the design and fabrication of semiconductor ICs is increasingly outsourced. This comes at the expense of trust. An untrusted entity, for instance a malicious designer or semiconductor foundry could pirate the design, or worse, maliciously modify it to leak secret information from the chip or sabotage its functionality. In addition, several companies now provide IC reverse engineering services that can reconstruct a manufactured chip's internal design details, thus compromising the designer's IP. Reverse engineering attack's on embedded devices and smart-cards have enabled proprietary encryption mechanisms to be revealed.

In this talk, I will present my recent work on understanding and addressing such security vulnerabilities in the context of two defense mechanisms. The first, split manufacturing, partitions a design across multiple chips, that are separately fabricated and "glued" together after fabrication. Since each foundry only sees a part of the design, its ability to infer the design intent is hindered. The second, IC camouflaging, seeks to hide the true Boolean functionality of logic gates from reverse engineers using clever layout techniques. We will discuss well-founded security metrics for these techniques and critically analyze their (purported) security guarantees.