Abstract: We introduce the first suit of active hardware metering scheme that aims to protect integrated circuits (IC) intellectual property (IP) against runtime tampering and piracy. 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 state transition graph and the finite state machine (FSM). On each chip, the added control signals are a function of the unique manufacturing variability IDs and are thus unclonable. To facilitate remote disabling of ICs, black hole states are integrated within the FSM. We analyze several types of potential attacks against the proposed active metering method. We further propose 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 obtained her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and her M.A. 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 include hardware security and intellectual property protection, content security, data integrity, and distributed embedded systems. She is the director of the Texas Instruments (TI) DSP Leadership University Program at Rice, a recipient of the DARPA/MTO young faculty award (YFA), and a recipient of 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 awards.

Sponsored by: Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering Seminar
Host: Prof. Sharad Malik