Biblio
Breach of security due to unauthorized access to electronic hardware devices or chips has recently become a serious concern for the internet-connected daily activities. Imaging with electron microscopy is one of the invasive techniques used to gain knowledge about a chip layout and extract secret information by the attackers. Automatic destruction or disturbance of the secret key during such invasive attacks are required to ensure protection against these attacks. We have characterized the disturbance caused to programmed phase change memory (PCM) cells by the imaging electron beam during scanning electron microscopy (SEM) in terms of the measured cell resistance. A sudden increase of resistance is observed on all imaged amorphous cells while the cells programmed to intermediate states show either abrupt increase or erratic decrease. These erratic disturbances of state are promising to mislead an attacker that is trying to acquire a stored key and leave indelible marks of tampering. Since PCM is recently being considered for implementation of various hardware security primitives, these beam-induced state change and tamper-evidence features enhance security of PCM devices against physical attacks.
Travelling Ionospheric Disturbances (TIDs) are ionospheric manifestations of internal atmospheric gravity waves (AGW) in the neutral atmosphere driven by near-Earth space dynamics and by lower atmosphere phenomena. They constitute a threat for operational systems such as precise navigation (e.g., EGNOS and NRTK) and high frequency geolocation as they can impose disturbances with amplitudes of up to 20% of the ambient electron density, and Doppler frequency shifts of the order of 0.5 Hz on HF signals. The Horizon 2020 Project TechTIDE (http://techtide.space.noa.gr/) funded by the European Commission aims at designing and testing new viable TID impact mitigation strategies for the technologies affected by developing a system able to calculate in real-time the main TID characteristics (velocity, amplitude, propagation drection), to realistically specify background ionospheric conditions and to specify those ionospheric characteristics whose perturbation, because of TIDs, cause the impact in each specific technology. The TechTIDE system will contribute new understanding of the physical processes resulting in the formation of TIDs, and will consequently help to identify the drivers in the interplanetary medium, the magnetosphere and the atmosphere. This paper will provide a description of the instrumentation involved and outline the project methodologies for the identification and tracking of TIDs based on the exploitation of real-time observations from networks of Digisonde, GNSS receivers and Continuous Doppler Sounding Systems.