Active Hardware Metering for Piracy Prevention and Security
Farinaz Koushanfar
Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science
Rice University
Abstract
We introduce the first active hardware metering scheme that aims to
protect integrated circuits (IC) intellectual property (IP) against piracy
and runtime tampering. The novel metering method simultaneously employs
inherent unclonable variability in modern manufacturing technology, and
functionality preserving alternations of the structural IC specifications.
Active metering works by enabling the designers to lock each IC and to
remotely disable it. The objectives are realized by adding new states and
transitions to the original finite state machine (FSM) to create boosted
finite state machines (BFSM) of the pertinent design. A unique and
unpredictable ID generated by an IC is utilized to place an BFSM into the
power-up state upon activation. The designer, knowing the transition table,
is the only one who can generate input sequences required to bring the BFSM
into the functional initial (reset) state. To facilitate remote disabling of
ICs, black hole states are integrated within the BFSM.
We introduce nine types of potential attacks against the proposed active
metering method. We further describe a number of countermeasures that must
be taken to preserve the security of active metering against the potential
attacks. The implementation details of the method with the objectives of
being low-overhead, unclonable, obfuscated, stable, while having a diverse
set of keys is presented. The active metering method was implemented,
synthesized and mapped on the standard benchmark circuits. Experimental
evaluations illustrate that the method has a low-overhead in terms of power,
delay, and area, while it is extremely resilient against the considered
attacks.
Biography
Farinaz Koushanfar is an assistant professor at the departments of
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science (CS) at Rice
University since August 2006. She has finished her PhD in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, and her MA in Statistics at UC Berkeley in
December 2005. Prior to joining Rice, she held the Coordinated Science Lab
(CSL) fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her
research interests are in hardware security and intellectual property
protection, data integrity, and distributed embedded systems. She is the
recipient of the DARPA/MTO Young Faculty Award across all core technology
areas, and the NSF CAREER Award. She has also received Intel Open
Collaborative Research fellowship, a best paper at Mobicom, NSF graduate
student fellowship, and the UCLA Woman4change leadership award.
http://www.ece.rice.edu/~fk1/