Security model for protecting intellectual property of state-of-the-art microfluidic biochips

Abstract

Microfluidic biochips or lab-on-a-chip systems are controlled by the actuation sequences designed for some specific bioprotocols. Different attacks specifically, hardware Trojans in diagnostic kits like microfluidic biochips can jeopardize the healthcare industries. As the actuation sequence is also a piece of information, which can be altered by hardware Trojans, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc., it is essential to design a security model with some proper encryption techniques in order to make biochip designs trustworthy. Thus, in this paper, we present a security model for avoiding intellectual property theft of actuation sequences for microfluidic biochips in each stage of the biochip design flow. Furthermore, we describe systematic algorithms to minimize the time requirements for achieving the desired goals so that the chance of an attack is reduced, and hence, to enhance the security concerns of microfluidic biochips. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed security model leads to maintain the time-to-result while not exceeding the completion time of different bioprotocols. The proposed scheme, which used AES as an encryption algorithm with a 128-bit encryption key, has also shown a speedup of 8.5 (with 88% efficiency) faster than the prior efficient scheme.