Magic

Abstract

The performance of an IC degrades over its lifetime, ultimately resulting in IC failure. In this article, we present a hardware attack (called MAGIC) to maliciously accelerate NBTI aging effects in cores. In this attack, we identify the input patterns that maliciously age the pipestages of a core. We then craft a program that generates these patterns at the inputs of the targeted pipestage. We demonstrate the MAGIC-based attack on the OpenSPARC processor. Executing this program dramatically accelerates the aging process and degrades the processor's performance by 10.92% in 1 month, bypassing existing aging mitigation and timing-error correction schemes. We also present two low-cost techniques to thwart the proposed attack.

Aging-Induced Failure Prognosis via Digital Sensors

“…However, along with such advantages, the degradation of the integrated circuits' performance over time has received a lot of attention. Such degradation, the socalled device aging, can jeopardize both the reliability and security of the integrated circuits [2,14]. Device aging mainly increases the paths' delay and ultimately results in violating the timing guardband and corrupting device output.…”