STARSS

Concern about the security and reliability of our electronic systems and infrastructure is at an all-time high. Economic factors dictate that the design, manufacturing, testing, and deployment of silicon chips are spread across many companies and countries with different and often conflicting goals and interests. In modern complex digital designs, behaviors at a good fraction of observable output signals for many operational cycles are unspecified and vulnerable to malicious modifications, known as Hardware Trojans.

The trend of outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing to oversea foundries has introduced several security vulnerabilities -- reverse engineering, malicious circuit insertion, counterfeiting, and intellectual property piracy -- making the semiconductor industry lose billions of dollars. Split manufacturing of integrated circuits reduces vulnerabilities introduced by an untrusted foundry by manufacturing only some of the layers at an untrusted high-end foundry and the remaining layers at a trusted low-end foundry.

The trend of outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing to oversea foundries has introduced several security vulnerabilities -- reverse engineering, malicious circuit insertion, counterfeiting, and intellectual property piracy -- making the semiconductor industry lose billions of dollars. Split manufacturing of integrated circuits reduces vulnerabilities introduced by an untrusted foundry by manufacturing only some of the layers at an untrusted high-end foundry and the remaining layers at a trusted low-end foundry.

Design of complex semiconductor circuits and systems requires many steps, involves hundreds of engineers, and is typically distributed across multiple locations and organizations worldwide. The conventional processes and tools for design of semiconductors can ensure the correctness, that is, the resulting product does what it is supposed to do. However, these processes do not provide confidence about whether the chip is altered such that it provides unauthorized access or control.

With the proliferation of electronics into every day life, integrated circuits (ICs) process and store more sensitive information than ever before. The extraction of on-chip assets, such as keys, firmware, personal and information, threatens state-of-the-art military technologies, commercial industries, and society alike through counterfeiting, theft, fraud, development of exploits, and much more. Although protection against software and non-invasive methods of extraction has been widely investigated, physical probing has received little attention.