Detection of Counterfeit ICs Using Public Identification Sequences and Side-Channel Leakage

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new approach for counterfeit protection against remarked, overproduced, and out-of-spec integrated circuits (ICs). Our approach uses identification sequences that are regularly published by the original chip manufacturer and hidden in the electromagnetic (EM) leakage of authentic chips. A portion of the chip area is dedicated to a crypto engine running in stream cipher mode that is initialized with a unique key and an initialization vector stored in one-time-programmable antifuse memory. IC identification is carried out in the field by obtaining EM measurements of deployed ICs and by proving the presence of the genuine identification sequences in the measurements. We evaluate our approach using a proof-of-concept implementation on three FPGA boards by capturing EM leakage of the FPGAs under test at their decoupling capacitors. The results show that the user can carry out IC identification on-site, using standard lab equipment in short amount of time.