As the pervasiveness of microelectronic systems continues into increasingly diverse sectors of modern society, so do the vulnerabilities of such systems, creating an ever-widening opportunity for malicious adversaries to steal private information, destroy property or worse, subvert systems in a manner that results in the loss of human life. These problems are becoming particularly acute with the proliferation of mobile computing and the debut of new information-sharing and control systems such as the health information exchange, smart grid, home automation, smart cars, sensor networks and many types of command and control infrastructures used in commercial, industrial and military systems. Our vision at IC-Safety is to provide an hardware-based security and trust foundation for modern electronic systems as a countermeasure to the increasing level of risk and vulnerability that exists in such systems.

IC-Safety Technology Summary

Key differentiators of proposed hardware-security and trust technologies, over other hardware and software-based methods:

Our PUF-based authentication and encryption protocol called PARCE securely encodes confidential information in the helper data for encryption and authentication, and represents the first entirely PUF-based encryption mechanism that does not require heavy-weight cryptographic algorithms.

Our Propagation-of-Provence technology enables recipients of confidential information to validate the source of said information and to propagate the provenance property to another recipient in a chain of transactions.

Our FPGA-based differential power analysis countermeasure called SPREAD changes the logic structure of the encryption engine over time, making it extremely difficult for adversaries to reverse engineer device secret keys and other types of sensitive information by analyzing side-channel signals.

Our non-volatile-memory (NVM) physical unclonable function (PUF) completely eliminates the need for helper data during the regeneration of cryptographic keys, providing an extremely low cost solution.

IC-Safety Technology Benefits

Every day, more of society’s infrastructures for transportation, power generation, water, food, and information exchanges are going “online” and therefore becoming increasingly vulnerable to hardware hackers, unfriendly nation states, and terrorist organizations.

PUFs represent the next-generation of hardware security. They are resistant to spoofing, are volatile and non-replicable, and can be used to encrypt communication channels, protect against hardware piracy and malicious forms of hardware cloning and substitution.

Our PUF technologies significantly improve the security and privacy of information and communications accessed from mobile platforms and in the cloud, e.g., personal bank accounts and email, as well as guard personal information against identity theft and allow recovery of stolen portable devices. The trust features of our proposed technologies will allow tamper to be detected in security sensitive systems, such as electronic voting machines, electronic security systems, sensor networks, and control and command systems that manage the smart grid and transportation infrastructures. They also enable the implementation of new authentication-based systems that allow electronic components to be tracked as they move through the supply chain, as a means of thwarting attempts to insert malicious clones or to substitute genuine components with lower quality or recycled components.

IC-Safety PUF Technology Characteristics

IC-Safety has developed a new type of physical unclonable function (PUF), a process that measures the physical properties of a computer chip and, when queried about that measurement, generates a randomized and reproducible response. While PUF technology was proposed several decades ago, IC-Safety has refined it and patented the result.

Unlike other security devices that are applied by the manufacturer, the PUF’s signature is secret. Even the manufacturer of the device can be prevented knowing the PUF bitstring, and invasive efforts to steal the secret(s) would destroy the chip.

IC-Safety provides commercialized and proven technologies that address increasing concerns over the security and trust of society’s electronic infrastructures, including the power grid, transit systems, electronic health information exchange (HIE) networks and electronic voting machines, as well as traditional areas of concern around banking, credit cards and other systems that inter-operate with people and their personal information.

IC-Safety integrates chip-level, board-level and system-level security primitives and applies techniques to measure trust in many types of networked electronic systems that are vulnerable to attacks by smart adversaries. Our technologies are based on the latest cutting-edge security and trust techniques including PUFs and Hardware Trojan Horse (HTH) detection testing methods.

IC-Safety’s Key PUF-Based Innovations

Nearly all hardware security and trust mechanisms depend on the availability of a secret key bitstring.

The PUF provides a secret key by leveraging manufacturing variations on the chip, in contrast to traditional mechanisms that require the manufacturer to “burn-in” the key into a specialized non-volatile memory.

This technology simplifies the process of assigning a key to each chip and reduces cost by eliminating the need for a non-volatile memory.

It provides each chip with a secret key that even the manufacturer is not able to access.

PUFs store their secrets in manufacturing variations, i.e., they do not exist in digital form while the IC is powered off.

PUFs generate and store secrets in a more secure manner, which in turn, improves the robustness of security-based applications that leverage them.

The subtle nature of these variations makes it difficult or impossible for an adversary to probe them without altering and/or destroying the secret.