If an Integrated Circuit (IC) is designed and fabricated in a foundry that is outside the direct control of the (fab-less) design house, reverse engineering, malicious circuit modification, and Intellectual Property (IP) piracy are all possible. An attacker, anywhere in this design flow, can reverse engineer the functionality of design, and steal and claim ownership of the IP. An untrustworthy IC foundry may overbuild ICs and sell the excess parts in the gray market. Rogue elements in the foundry may insert malicious circuits (hardware Trojans) into the design without the designer's knowledge. Because of these and similar hardware-based attacks, the semiconductor industry annually loses billions of dollars. In this project, the investigators aim at leveraging techniques proposed in the context of IC testing to cope with manufacturing defects for developing defense techniques that help regain trust in electronic chips.
Benefits to society ensuing from successful completion of this project include trustworthy electronics for healthcare, defense, finance, transportation, and automotive applications. One of the investigators received a grant from the US Department of Education to recruit underrepresented minorities and women into the Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD program at NYU-Poly. This applicant pool will be used to recruit underrepresented minorities and women to work on this project. The investigators routinely advise undergraduates as part of the NYU-Poly Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, and the NSF REU program. These undergraduate students will be eligible to work on the present project as well. One of the investigators has developed a graduate course on Introduction to Trustworthy Hardware. The investigators will adapt some of these course modules for inclusion in appropriate undergraduate courses at their institution.
