Robust and Noninvasive IC Authentication Using Radiated Electromagnetic Emissions

Abstract

Counterfeiting of integrated circuits (ICs) has become a genuine concern of the semiconductor industry. Counterfeiting involves both economic and safety issues. The semiconductor companies and embedded system designers are looking for different solutions to gain confidence in the ICs they use. It is necessary to find a robust solution that is both efficient in terms of cost and implementation to detect and avoid the counterfeiting of ICs. In this article, we have described our studies of the use of an electromagnetic (EM)-based approach that can be utilized to authenticate ICs. Additionally, this article suggests ways in which the proposed EM-based solution is robust against reliability and aging effects. Our proposed scheme details the usability of manufacturing-based process variations (PVs) to create device fingerprints using the EM-based approach. To highlight the distinction between various devices under test (DUT), the resulting EM fingerprints have been subjected to post-processing schemes. To validate our approach, we have performed our experiments across different nanoscale field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). We have also discussed in brief the implementation and results using this technique for microcontrollers (MCUs).