System-Level Counterfeit Detection Using On-Chip Ring Oscillator Array

Abstract

Counterfeiting has unfortunately become a worldwide epidemic affecting electronic systems from consumer goods to military equipment, which seriously jeopardizes system security, reliability, and electronic vendors’ reputation. The counterfeit parts, e.g., integrated circuits (ICs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs), have shown a significant increase in type and number over the recent years. However, the existing counterfeit detection techniques deal with IC or PCB separately, and hence, they cannot verify the authenticity of an electronic system as a whole. In this paper, we propose concurrent IC and PCB authentication (CIPA), a novel methodology that concurrently verifies the authenticity of both IC and PCB through extracting the signature pairs generated by a ring oscillator (RO) array without/with PCB cavity resonance. With CIPA, remote authentication is allowable by transmitting the signatures between the verifier and the system vendor. The CIPA structure has shown insignificant area overhead (0.945% on average) when implemented on a number of benchmarks. Both CIPA and the benchmarks have been implemented on the authentic and counterfeit FPGA systems, and the results give 100% confidence in detecting counterfeit ones. Furthermore, the authenticity of PCB and IC (i.e., authentic or counterfeit) of the system under test can also be mined from CIPA signatures. According to the experimental results, systems composed of different authenticity states of PCB and IC are differentiated from each other with the confidence of 97.62%. The overall authentication time is $40.2~\mu \text{s}$ considering 50-MHz system clock.