The threat of hardware Trojans has been widely recognized by academia, industry, and government agencies. A Trojan can compromise security of a system in spite of cryptographic protection. The damage caused by a Trojan may not be limited to a business or reputation, but could have a severe impact on public safety, national economy, or national security. An extremely stealthy way of implementing hardware Trojans has been presented by at CHES'2012. Their work have shown that it is possible to inject a Trojan in a random number generator compliant with FIPS 140-2 and NIST SP800-90 standards by exploiting non-zero aliasing probability of Logic Built-In-Self-Test (LBIST). In this paper, we present two methods for modifying LBIST to prevent such an attack. The first method makes test patterns dependent on a configurable key which is programed into a chip after the manufacturing stage. The second method uses a remote test management system which can execute LBIST using a different set of test patterns at each test cycle.
To perform a visual inspection, a target chip is first depackaged. Then, the layers of the chip are removed one-by-one by polishing or etching and, for each exposed layer, images are taken with a high-resolution imaging method such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) or Focused Ion Beam (FIM) @cite_25 . These images are then compared to the corresponding images of a golden chip to detect possible differences. A golden chip is a chip which is known to have the correct functionality complying with the specification, without any malicious modifications.
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Many semiconductor chips used in a wide range of applications require protection against physical attacks or tamper resistance. These attacks assume that a direct access to the chip is possible with either establishing electrical connections to signal wires or at least doing some measurements. The importance of protection against physical attacks is dictated by the amount of valuable and sensitive information stored on the chip. This could be secret data or company secrets and intellectual property (IP), electronic money for service access, or banking smartcards. The security in chips serves to deter prospective attackers from performing unauthorized access and benefiting from it. There are many areas that rely on tamper resistance of silicon chips. One of the first was car industry with theft protection and car alarms. Then in the early 1990s service providers such as PayTV, satellite TV, and utility companies realized that their service can be stolen if the access and payment cards are not properly protected. From the late 1990s home entertainment companies realized that their game consoles became the target of dishonest users who wanted to run illegal copies of the games. These days many device manufacturers from computer peripherals and mobile phones to printers and computers are worried about possible IP theft by third parties – either competitors or subcontractors. All the above challenges force hardware engineers to find secure solutions – either better protected off-the-shelf chips or their own custom chips. As in most cases it is impractical to block direct access to the device and its components, protection against physical attacks became the essential part of the system design. These days we have a continuous battle between the manufacturers who invent new security solutions learning their lessons from previous mistakes and the hacker community which is constantly trying to break the protection in various devices. Both sides are also constantly improving their knowledge and experience. In this endless war, the front line shifts forward and backward regularly. Deep down, the problem concerns both economics and law. On the one hand, when dishonest people try to steal property, there will be a demand to increase security. On the other, reverse engineering was always part of technological progress, helping to design compatible products and improve existing ones. The dividing line between legal (reverse engineering) and illegal (piracy) is difficult.