Biblio

Intellectual Property (IP) verification is a crucial component of System-on-Chip (SoC) design in the modern IC design business model. Given a globalized supply chain and an increasing demand for IP reuse, IP theft has become a major concern for the IC industry. In this paper, we address the trust issues that arise between IP owners and IP users during the functional verification of an IP core. Our proposed scheme ensures the privacy of IP owners and users, by a) generating a privacy-preserving version of the IP, which is functionally equivalent to the original design, and b) employing homomorphically encrypted input vectors. This allows the functional verification to be securely outsourced to a third-party, or to be executed by either parties, while revealing the least possible information regarding the test vectors and the IP core. Experiments on both combinational and sequential benchmark circuits demonstrate up to three orders of magnitude IP verification slowdown, due to the computationally intensive fully homomorphic operations, for different security parameter sizes.

The wide deployment of general purpose and embedded microprocessors has emphasized the need for defenses against cyber-attacks. Due to the globalized supply chain, however, there are several stages where a processor can be maliciously modified. The most promising stage, and the hardest during which to inject the hardware trojan, is the fabrication stage. As modern microprocessor chips are characterized by very dense, billion-transistor designs, such attacks must be very carefully crafted. In this paper, we demonstrate zero overhead malicious modifications on both high-performance and embedded microprocessors. These hardware trojans enable privilege escalation through execution of an instruction stream that excites the necessary conditions to make the modification appear. The minimal footprint, however, comes at the cost of a small window of attack opportunities. Experimental results show that malicious users can gain escalated privileges within a few million clock cycles. In addition, no system crashes were reported during normal operation, rendering the modifications transparent to the end user.