AntiDOTE: Protecting Debug Against Outsourced Test Entities

Abstract

For a variety of business and technical reasons, semiconductor companies might choose to outsource fabrication, assembly, and testing. To fulfill their obligations, external foundries and test houses need access to chip test interfaces to ensure basic functionality. These test interfaces must be protected against illegitimate accesses to prevent extraction of sensitive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and end-user data from devices in the field as well as thwart intellectual property (IP) piracy and overproduction of integrated circuits. In this article, we present AntiDOTE, a low-cost and robust access control mechanism for test interfaces that supports outsourced fabrication, assembly, and testing with untrusted foundries and testers without compromising security. We showcase AntiDOTE on an ARM Cortex M0-based micro-controller fabricated using commercially available 55nm technology.