PDNPulse: Sensing PCB Anomaly with the Intrinsic Power Delivery Network

Abstract

The ubiquitous presence of printed circuit boards (PCBs) in modern electronic systems and embedded devices makes their integrity a top security concern. To take advantage of the economies of scale, today's PCB design and manufacturing are often performed by suppliers around the globe, exposing them to many security vulnerabilities along the segmented PCB supply chain. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the PCB designs also leaves ample room for numerous sneaky board-level attacks to be implemented throughout each stage of a PCB's lifetime, threatening many electronic devices. In this paper, we propose PDNPulse, a power delivery network (PDN) based PCB anomaly detection framework that can identify a wide spectrum of boardlevel malicious modifications. PDNPulse leverages the fact that the PDN's characteristics are inevitably affected by modifications to the PCB, no matter how minuscule. By detecting changes to the PDN impedance profile and using the Frechet distancebased anomaly detection algorithms, PDNPulse can robustly and successfully discern malicious modifications across the system. Using PDNPulse, we conduct extensive experiments on seven commercial-off-the-shelf PCBs, covering different design scales, different threat models, and seven different anomaly types. The results confirm that PDNPulse creates an effective security asymmetry between attack and defense.

Utilization of Impedance Disparity Incurred from Switching Activities to Monitor and Characterize Firmware Activities

“…The impedance-based side-channel information has been used to detect malicious modifications of hardware [14]- [18]. The authors of [14] use a vector network analyzer (VNA) to detect hardware Trojans, recycled printed circuit boards (PCBs), malicious components, and counterfeit processors.…”

“…The impedance-based side-channel information has been used to detect malicious modifications of hardware [14]- [18]. The authors of [14] use a vector network analyzer (VNA) to detect hardware Trojans, recycled printed circuit boards (PCBs), malicious components, and counterfeit processors. The underlying method to detect hardware anomalies on a board relies on measuring the equivalent impedance from various locations on the board.…”