Ale Lukaszew
$450,000
Nima Maghari
University of Florida
Florida
Engineering (ENG)
Supply chain globalization and e-commerce have caused a substantial rise in counterfeit electronics trafficking, which was only exacerbated by the pandemic-induced microchip shortage. When high-demand electronics are not available in the marketplace, they become prime targets for counterfeiters. Aside from billions of dollars lost from intellectual property (IP) infringement, counterfeit electronics are often of substandard quality, thereby creating risks for systems and infrastructure in critical sectors such as healthcare, food and agriculture, communications, transportation, energy, manufacturing, emergency services, defense, and more. Recent legislation, such as the CHIPS Act, stresses the need for procedures to combat counterfeiting, but key stakeholders have resisted adoption of the requisite technologies for years. Counterfeit detection and avoidance can be accomplished by physical inspection, electrical tests, or design-for-anti-counterfeit (DfAC). The former two have been the mainstay, but are less reliable, more expensive, and lack automation. Although DfAC primitives can only be included in brand new electronics, they are more promising with respect to accuracy, authentication cost, and scalability. Further, centralized and decentralized ledger technologies, including blockchains, are advancing to support DfAC primitive verification and for immutable traceability and provenance of electronics. This project aims to address the major barriers for DfAC primitive integration into microchips and systems. Counterfeit attestation modules (CAMOs for short) will be developed to efficiently collect DfAC outputs from all the microchips on a printed circuit board (PCB), verify that the PCB itself has not been tampered, and protect communication of results to a digital ledger for en masse authentication. In addition, lightweight DfAC primitives that can be conveniently incorporated into common microchip modules will also be explored. Scalable, convenient, and inexpensive detection of counterfeit electronics from this project shall result in savings for commercial and defense industries that will be passed on to consumers and taxpayers.
The above goals will be achieved through four tasks. First, a novel circuit called Resonant Frequency Lock-On (Res-FLO) will be explored for self-contained authentication of PCBs. Res-FLO captures unique, process variation dependent signatures from PCB power distribution networks to detect cloned and tampered PCBs. Next, to support chip authentication and provide security in CAMO communication protocols, lightweight DfAC primitives will be investigated for detecting the two most prevalent counterfeit chip types – recycled and cloned. The former will be detected by measuring degradation in analog and digital low dropout regulators (LDOs) while the latter can be achieved by adopting physical unclonable functions (PUFs). Third, inexpensive protocols that provide confidentiality and integrity for communications within the PCB and to a ledger/blockchain will be composed from elements of the first two tasks. Namely, CAMO will exploit the large input/output space, machine learning (ML) attack resistance, and multiple measurements of strong PUFs to increase the security and confidence of authentic/counterfeit classification without the need for expensive cryptographic and error correction schemes. Finally, the CAMO primitives and protocols will be taped out for proof-of-concept and to capture overheads, impacts of aging and noise, resistance to attacks, etc.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.