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Remote Hardware Enabling/Disabling Techniques Using Manufacturing Variability

詳細技術說明

Remote Hardware Enabling/Disabling Techniques Using Manufacturing VariabilityTechnology

*Abstract

Technology
This invention proposes the first active hardware metering scheme that symmetrically protects the IP designer and the foundry by providing a key-exchange mechanism. The active metering method uniquely locks the IC at the fabrication house by utilizing the unclonable variability-based ID of each silicon circuit, known as the random unique block (RUB). This does not alter the functionality of the original design, and only the designer can provide the key to the locked IC. Experimental evaluations of the proposed metering method on standard benchmark circuits illustrate the low overhead and the applicability of the approach on industrial-size designs and its resiliency against different attacks. The invention includes hardware design and software.

Advantages
The key element of this technology is that the ICs are functionally locked. Under other hardware protection schemes, the chips are not functionally locked, and the locking modules are easily side-stepped. Also, most other methods employ public-key cryptography, which has high overhead and is not applicable to smaller designs, especially power constrained designs. In this invention, the lock is intelligently embedded within the structure, as opposed to an external lock.

Potential Applications
This technology is applicable to designers of integrated circuits that contract out the manufacturing of their designs and want to avoid hardware piracy. Specifically, this technology can be used in the following scenarios. use of a combination of unique functionality and RUB to remotely authenticate and disable smart cards; certification that a computation was executed on a specified IC in a distributed environment; and prevention of software piracy by the creation of techniques to produce software than can only run on a specific IC.

The Inventors
Farinaz Koushanfar is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University.
Miodrag Potkonjak is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA.

Availability
This technology is available for license.  A utility patent (12/537,978) has been filed with the USPTO.

Inquiries

Nila Bhakuni
713-348-6231
bhakuni@rice.edu

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美國