Design and fabrication of integrated circuits (ICs) are becoming increasingly vulnerable to malicious activities and alterations with globalization. These vulnerabilities have raised serious concerns regarding possible threats to many critical applications. An adversary can introduce a Trojan designed to disable and/or destroy a system at some future time or the Trojan may serve to leak confidential information covertly to the adversary. This research develops efficient procedures for detection of malicious alterations and subtle modifications in integrated circuits. Side-channel signal analysis methods as well on-chip measurement structures are developed to detect and localize the inserted Trojans in very deep submicron ICs. Novel design-for-hardware-trust techniques are developed in this project to increase the capabilities and effectiveness of the detection and isolation strategies.
The Intellectual Merit of the research is the development of techniques optimized to improve the level of confidence that an IC will carry out its intended function and nothing more. The broader impact is (i) the development of techniques for hardware authentication that would be of interests to US government, agencies and many fab-less semiconductor companies, (ii) the societal benefits that include trustworthy electronics for healthcare, defense weapons and dependable computing platforms for intelligence, weather forecasting, and transportation, (iii) the education of undergraduate and graduate students, (iv) the development of new courses, and (v) the dissemination of data and methodologies to researchers in academia and industry.
