RESEARCH PROJECT TITLE: REGAINING TRUST IN ELECTRONIC CHIPS
FACULTY NAME & TITLE: OZGUR SINANOGLU, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING
RESEARCH PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Support for multiple capabilities and mixed technologies has increased the cost of ownership of advanced electronics chip manufacturing foundries. For instance, the cost of owning a chip foundry will be $5 billion in 2015. As a result, many of the chip design companies cannot afford owning and acquiring expensive foundries and hence, outsource their design fabrication to offshore foundries. This globalization of Integrated Circuit (IC) design flow has introduced security vulnerabilities. If a design is fabricated in a foundry that is outside the direct control of the (fabless) design house, reverse engineering, malicious circuit modification, and Intellectual Property (IP) piracy are possible. An attacker, anywhere in this design flow, can reverse engineer the functionality of design, and steal and claim ownership of the IP. An untrusted IC foundry may overbuild ICs and sell the excess parts in the gray market. Rogue elements in the foundry may insert malicious circuits (hardware Trojans) into the design without the designer's knowledge. Because of these and similar hardware-based attacks, the semiconductor industry loses $4 billion annually. This project aims at understanding the aforementioned hardware security and trust issues, surveying the existing solutions, and proposing and implementing new ones.
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