Hardware Trojans and Piracy of PCBs

Abstract

Malicious modification of a design in a foundry or design house (via hardware Trojan attacks) and counterfeiting attacks are intended to modify/disrupt and syphon information and profits from the host manufacturer. While these attacks have emerged as major security concerns for integrated circuits (ICs), a similar vulnerability, at a higher level, i.e., printed circuit board (PCB), can be more easily realized due to the highly distributed supply chain. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of modern PCBs and growing reliance on third-party entities make Trojan and counterfeiting attacks in PCBs highly feasible. In this chapter, we first describe the possible attack models and demonstrate instances of hardware Trojan insertion in fabricated PCBs that can either cause malfunction or leak secret information. We review the effectiveness of traditional PCB test methodologies in detecting these Trojans. We also present possible protection approaches against such attacks including a reverse engineering-based detection approach and a low-overhead preventive design solution. We then describe how extending integrated circuits (ICs) authentication techniques such as physically unclonable function (PUF) to isolate cloned PCBs can be realized. Additionally, analysis of various sources of variations in PCB and qualitatively studying the quality metrics to evaluate the PCB PUFs are also performed. Lastly, we describe few flavors of PCB PUFs by exploiting the manufacture-induced process variations.