Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/210

Secure and Efficient Initialization and Authentication Protocols for SHIELD

Chenglu Jin and Marten van Dijk

Abstract: With the globalization of semiconductor production, out-sourcing IC fabrication has become a trend in various aspects. This, however, introduces serious threats from the entire untrusted supply chain. To combat these threats, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) proposed the SHIELD (Supply Chain Hardware Integrity for Electronics Defense) program to design a secure hardware root-of-trust, called dielet, to be inserted into the host package of legitimately produced ICs. Dielets are RF powered and communicate with the outside world through their RF antennas. They have sensors which allow them to passively (without the need for power) record malicious events which can later be read out during an authentication protocol between the dielet and server with a smartphone as intermediary.

We propose the first concrete protocol design for initialization in SHIELD and an improved protocol design for authentication in SHIELD (compared to DARPA's call for proposals for SHIELD). As the basis for authentication we propose to use AES counter mode encryption (as opposed to DARPA's plain AES encryption). We show that this leads to several advantages: (1) resistance to a ``try-and-check'' attack which in case of DARPA's authentication protocol nullifies the effectiveness of one of SHIELD's main goals (that of being able to detect and trace adversarial activities with significant probability), (2) immunity against differential power analysis and differential fault analysis for free, (3) a 2$\times$ speed up of the authentication phase by halving the number of communication rounds with the server, and (4) a significant reduction of the power consumption of the dielet by halving the number of needed AES encryptions and by halving the number of transmitted bits.

For initialization (each dielet needs to go through an initialization phase during which the manufacturer sets a serial ID and cryptographic key) we propose the first efficient and secure protocol where dielets generate their own serial ID and key by using a true random number generator (TRNG). The advantage of the proposed initialization protocol is that (1) dielets are able to efficiently generate their serial IDs and keys in parallel on the wafer during a trusted manufacturing process, (2) dielets communicate their key and serial ID to a trusted authentication server after insertion into host chips during a trusted assembly process (this avoids uploading keys and serial IDs to authentication servers becoming a bottleneck), and (3) transits between trusted fabrication and trusted assembly facilities do not need to be trusted (due to a one-time initialization mode construct).

The area overhead of our authentication and initialization protocols together is only 64-bit NVM, one 8-bit counter and a TRNG based on a single SRAM-cell together with corresponding control logic.

Category / Keywords: Supply Chain Security, SHIELD, Initialization Protocol, Authentication Protocol, Counter Mode Encryption

Date: received 5 Mar 2015, last revised 28 Jun 2015

Contact author: chenglu jin at uconn edu

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Added more discussion and implementation details.

Version: 20150629:051547 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2015/210

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