Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/324

3D Hardware Canaries

Sébastien Briais and Stéphane Caron and Jean-Michel Cioranesco and Jean-Luc Danger and Sylvain Guilley and Jacques-Henri Jourdan and Arthur Milchior and David Naccache and Thibault Porteboeuf

Abstract: 3D integration is a promising advanced manufacturing process offering a variety of new hardware security protection opportunities. This paper presents a way of securing 3D ICs using Hamiltonian paths as hardware integrity verification sensors. As 3D integration consists in the stacking of many metal layers, one can consider surrounding a security-sensitive circuit part by a wire cage.

After exploring and comparing different cage construction strategies (and reporting preliminary implementation results on silicon), we introduce a "hardware canary". The canary is a spatially distributed chain of functions $F_i$ positioned at the vertices of a 3D cage surrounding a protected circuit. A correct answer $(F_n \circ \ldots \circ F_1)(m)$ to a challenge $m$ attests the canary's integrity.

Category / Keywords: applications / IC protection, MAC, active shields, Hamiltonian cycle

Date: received 8 Jun 2012

Contact author: cioranesco at hotmail fr

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Version: 20120612:035613 (All versions of this report)

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