PhD Defence Notice: "Secure and Unclonable Integrated Circuits" by Kleber Hugo Stangherlin

Candidate: Kleber Hugo Stangherlin
Title: Secure and Unclonable Integrated Circuits
Date: September 22, 2022
Time: 9:00 AM
Place: REMOTE ATTENDANCE
Supervisor: Sachdev, Manoj

Abstract:
Semiconductor manufacturing is increasingly reliant in offshore foundries, which has raised concerns with counterfeiting, piracy, and unauthorized overproduction by the contract foundry. The recent shortage of semiconductors has aggravated such problems, with the electronic components market being flooded by recycled, remarked, or even out-of-spec, and defective parts. Moreover, modern internet connected applications require mechanisms that enable secure communication, which must be protected by security counter-measures to mitigate various types of attacks. In this thesis, we describe techniques to aid counterfeit prevention, and mitigate secret extraction attacks that exploit power consumption information.

Counterfeit prevention requires simple and trustworthy identification. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) harvest process variation to create a unique and unclonable digital fingerprint of an IC. However, learning attacks can model the PUF behavior, invalidating its unclonability claims. In this thesis, we research circuits and architectures to make PUFs more resilient to learning attacks. First, we propose the concept of non-monotonic response quantization, where responses not always encode the best performing circuit structure. Then, we explore the design space of PUF compositions, assessing the trade-off between stability and resilience to learning attacks. Finally, we introduce a lightweight key based challenge obfuscation technique that uses a chip unique secret to construct PUFs which are more resilient to learning attacks.

Modern internet protocols demand message integrity, confidentiality, and (often) non-repudiation. Adding support for such mechanisms requires on-chip storage of a secret key. Even if the key is produced by a PUF, it will be subject to key extraction attacks that use power consumption information. Secure integrated circuits must address power analysis attacks with appropriate counter-measures. Traditional mitigation techniques have limited scope of protection, and impose several restrictions on how sensitive data must be manipulated. We demonstrate a bit-serial RISC-V microprocessor implementation with no plain-text data, where all values are protected using Boolean masking and differential domino logic. Software can run with little to no counter-measures, reducing code size and performance overheads. Our methodology is fully automated and can be applied to designs of arbitrary size or complexity. We also provide details on other key components such as clock randomizer, memory protection, and random number generator.