Anti-BlUFf: towards counterfeit mitigation in IC supply chains using blockchain and PUF

Abstract

The complexity of today’s integrated circuit (IC) supply chain, organised in several tiers and including many companies located in different countries, makes it challenging to assess the history and integrity of procured ICs. This enables malicious practices like counterfeiting and insertion of back doors, which are extremely dangerous, especially in supply chains of ICs for industrial control systems used in critical infrastructures, where a country and human lives can be put at risk. This paper aims at mitigating these issues by introducing Anti-BlUFf (Anti-counterfeiting Blockchain- and PUF-based infrastructure), an approach where ICs are uniquely identified and tracked along the chain, across multiple sites, to detect tampering. Our solution is based on consortium blockchain and smart contract technologies; hence, it is decentralised, highly available and provides strong guarantees on the integrity of stored data and executed business logic. The unique identification of ICs along the chain is implemented by using physically unclonable functions (PUFs) as tamper-resistant IDs. We first define the threat model of an adversary interested in tampering with ICs along the supply chain and then provide the design of the tracking system that implements the proposed anti-counterfeiting approach. We present a security analysis of the tracking system against the designated threat model and a prototype evaluation to show its technical feasibility and assess its effectiveness in counterfeit mitigation. Finally, we discuss several key practical aspects concerning our solution ad its integration with real IC supply chains.