Analog/RF IP Protection: Attack Models, Defense Techniques, and Challenges

Sanabria-Borbón, Adriana C.; Jayasankaran, Nithyashankari Gummidipoondi; Hu, Jiang; Rajendran, Jeyavijayan; Sánchez-Sinencio, E.

doi:10.1109/tcsii.2020.3040725

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…However, migration to higher frequency bands complicates efforts to reduce the power consumption in wireless data links used for many consumer and medical applications. In addition to low power consumption, maintaining a high level of security and trust is critical in such links to protect sensitive data and preserve user privacy [2,3]. This requirement further complicates the design of low-power high-data throughput wireless transceivers operating at mm-Wave frequency bands.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Low-Power, 65 nm 24.6-to-30.1 GHz Trusted LC Voltage-Controlled Oscillator Achieving 191.7 dBc/Hz FoM at 1 MHz

Kurtoglu,

Shirazi,

Mirabbasi

et al. 2024

JLPEA

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This work presents a novel trusted LC voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with an embedded compact analog Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) used for authentication. The trusted VCO is implemented in a 1P9M 65 nm standard CMOS process and consumes 1.75 mW. It exhibits a measured phase noise (PN) of −104.8 dBc/Hz @ 1 MHz and −132.2 dBc/Hz @ 10 MHz offset, resulting in Figures of Merit (FoMs) of 191.7 dBc/Hz and 199.1 dBc/Hz, respectively. With the measured frequency tuning range (TR) of ~5.5 GHz, the FoM with tuning (FoMT) reaches 197.6 dBc/Hz and 205.0 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz and 10 MHz offset, respectively. The analog PUF consists of CMOS cross-coupled pairs in the main VCO to change analog characteristics. Benefiting from the impedance change and parasitic capacitance of the cross-coupled pairs, the AC and DC responses of the VCO are utilized for multiple responses for each input. The PUF consumes 0.83 pJ/bit when operating at 1.5 Gbps. The proposed PUF exhibits a measured Inter-Hamming Distance (HD) of 0.5058b and 0.4978b, with Intra-HD reaching 0.0055b and 0.0053b for the current consumption and fosc, respectively. The autocorrelation function (ACF) of 0.0111 and 0.0110 is obtained for the current consumption and fosc, respectively, at a 95% confidence level.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Low-Power, 65 nm 24.6-to-30.1 GHz Trusted LC Voltage-Controlled Oscillator Achieving 191.7 dBc/Hz FoM at 1 MHz

Kurtoglu,

Shirazi,

Mirabbasi

et al. 2024

JLPEA

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show abstract

“…In the last decade, extensive research has been carried out to understand trust and security threat scenarios in digital ICs. Analog and mixed-signal (A/M-S) ICs on the other hand have so far received far less attention and as a consequence the number of proposed solutions is low [3]. This work proposes MixLock, a method of hardware security for M-S ICs based on locking with the goal to prevent IP/IC piracy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digitally Assisted Mixed-Signal Circuit Security

Leonhard¹,

Limaye

Turk

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

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The design and manufacturing steps of a chip typically involve several parties. For example, a chip may comprise several third-party Intellectual Property (IP) cores and the Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication may be outsourced to a third-party foundry. IP cores and ICs are shared with potentially untrusted third parties and, as a result, are subject to piracy attacks. Even more, any legally purchased chip may be reverse-engineered to retrieve the design down to transistorlevel and, thereby, it is also subject to piracy attacks. In this paper, we propose MixLock, an anti-piracy countermeasure for mixed-signal IP cores and ICs. MixLock protection is based on inserting a lock mechanism into the design such that correct functionality is established only after applying a key which is the designer's secret. The lock mechanism acts on the mixedsignal performances by leveraging logic locking of the digital part. MixLock presents several key attributes. It is generally applicable, it is non-intrusive to the sensitive analog section, it incurs no performance penalty and has very low area and power overheads, it is fully automated, and it is capable of co-optimizing security in both the analog and digital domains. We demonstrate MixLock on a Σ∆ Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) using hardware measurements and an audio demonstrator.

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“…Efforts have concentrated primarily on digital designs with countermeasures such as locking [3], split manufacturing [4], and camouflaging [5]. For analog and mixed-signal (AMS) designs the first defenses have appeared only recently [6]- [8]. Similar countermeasure principles are adapted for AMS designs, including locking [9]- [17], split manufacturing [18], and camouflaging [19], [20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anti-Piracy of Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits in FD-SOI

Tlili¹,

Sayed

Mahmoud³

et al. 2022

2022 27th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)

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We propose an anti-piracy security technique based on locking for analog and mixed-signal circuits designed in FD-SOI. We show that obfuscating the body-bias voltages of tunable transistors is an effective way for inducing high functionality corruption. The obfuscation is achieved by constituting a secret key from the concatenation of the input digital codes of the body-bias generators that produce the correct body-bias voltages. We also propose a slight modification of the bodybias generator that increases prohibitively the time complexity of counter-attacks aiming at finding an approximate key. The proposed locking scheme is demonstrated on a Σ∆ modulator used in highly-digitized RF receiver architectures.

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Analog/RF IP Protection: Attack Models, Defense Techniques, and Challenges

Cited by 6 publications

References 38 publications

A Low-Power, 65 nm 24.6-to-30.1 GHz Trusted LC Voltage-Controlled Oscillator Achieving 191.7 dBc/Hz FoM at 1 MHz

A Low-Power, 65 nm 24.6-to-30.1 GHz Trusted LC Voltage-Controlled Oscillator Achieving 191.7 dBc/Hz FoM at 1 MHz

Digitally Assisted Mixed-Signal Circuit Security

Anti-Piracy of Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits in FD-SOI

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