IC Supply Chain Security
The modern multi-billion-dollar integrated-circuit supply chain is global and distributed as different entities come together to produce a packaged integrated circuit. Developers of these integrated circuits or IP authors as they are otherwise known, spend lots of time, money and effort to come up with an efficient design of an integrated circuit. Therefore, IC designs are considered as intellectual properties of IP authors, and security mechanisms are needed to prevent adversarial entities in the supply chain from stealing the circuit IPs. In my research, I use principles of modern cryptography to develop provably-secure defenses against IP theft.
- IEEE S&P’22: Hardening Circuit Design IP Against Reverse-Engineering Attacks [Paper]: my co-author (Dr. Thomas Shrimpton) and I gave provable-security foundations for design-hiding (DH) schemes that are used by IP authors to protect their circuit-design IPs from adversarial foundries. We gave the first DH scheme that provably hides combinational/stateless circuits against honest-but-curious adversaries that try to reverse-engineer the full functionality of the hidden circuit.
- CCS’17: Standardizing Bad Cryptographic Practice - A teardown of the IEEE P1735 standard for protecting electronic-design intellectual property[Paper]: my co-authors (Adib Nahiyan, Dr. Domenic Forte, Dr. Thomas Shrimpton) and I found weaknesses in the IEEE P1735 standard that leads to efficient recovery of plaintext circuit-design IP by exploiting error messages that electronic-design and automation tools output during synthesis of encrypted circuit-design IPs. This work resulted in 7 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) entries in the Vulnerability Notes Database and was featured in The Register, threatpost, The Hacker News, and other cybersecurity news publications. Note that the IEEE P1735 standard was aimed at protecting the circuit-design IP of IP authors from other adversarial IP authors in the design phase.