Tampering and Reverse Engineering of a chip to extract the hardware Intellectual Property (IP) core or to inject malicious alterations is a major concern. Digital systems susceptible to tampering are of immense concern to defense organizations. First, offshore chip manufacturing allows the design secrets of the IP cores to be transparent to the foundry and other entities along the production chain. Second, small malicious modifications to the design may not be detectable after fabrication without anti-tamper mechanisms. Some techniques have been developed in the past to improve the defense against such attacks but they tend to fall prey to the increasing power of the attacker. We present a new way to protect against tampering by a clever obfuscation of the design, which can be unlocked with a specific, dynamic path traversal. Hence, the functional mode of the controller is hidden with the help of obfuscated states, and the functional mode is made operational only on the formation of a specific interlocked Code-Word during state transition. No comparator is needed as the obfuscation is embedded within the transition function of the state machine itself. A side benefit is that any small alteration will be magnified via the obfuscated design. In other words, an alteration to the design will manifest itself as a large difference in the circuit's functionality. Experimental results on an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) circuit from the open-source IP-cores suite suggest that the proposed method provides better active defense mechanisms against attacks with nominal (7.8%) area overhead.
Trust and trustworthiness apply to a wide range of applications in automation and human interactions. Their definitions and characteristics vary depending on the context and the situation. Nevertheless, they are significant because of risk, vulnerability, uncertainty, and confidence. In this paper we review past work to converge our understanding of Trust (human centric and subjective) and trustworthiness (hardware/software centric and objective) across fields including literature from psychological, sociological, economic, automation, and cyberspace perspectives of trust. We expect to create a more rigorous definition of trust and trustworthiness that leads to finding the appropriate metrics to measure trust and trustworthiness dynamically.
In the days of modern engineering, a complex system can be designed and built using numerous sources of information, knowledge, hardware, and software. A factor that impacts the success of a complex system is trust. In designing a framework that allows for a unified trust model or trusting picture and defining a reliable metric for measuring trustworthiness, we are examining definitions and methodologies from social sciences and engineering. This paper uses a combination of publication analysis of research literature including psychological, sociological, economic, automation, and cyberspace perspectives of trust and technical dialogues with the subject matter experts at the Air Force Research Laboratory, to illuminate the interdisciplinary approach undertaken in hardware centric design with human interface. We review past work to highlight trustworthiness characteristics and trust measurements that conceptually could apply across fields under examination. We expect to create a more rigorous definition of trust and trustworthiness that leads to finding the appropriate metrics to measure trust and trustworthiness dynamically.
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