Paper 2024/631

BackMon: IC Backside Tamper Detection using On-Chip Impedance Monitoring

Tahoura Mosavirik, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Shahin Tajik, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Abstract

The expansion of flip-chip technologies and a lack of backside protection make the integrated circuit (IC) vulnerable to certain classes of physical attacks mounted from the IC's backside. Laser-assisted probing, electromagnetic, and body-biasing injection attacks are examples of such attacks. Unfortunately, there are few countermeasures proposed in the literature, and none are available commercially. Those that do exist are not only expensive but also incompatible with current IC manufacturing processes. They also cannot be integrated into legacy systems, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are integral parts of many industrial and defense systems. In this paper, we demonstrate how the impedance monitoring of the printed circuit board (PCB) and IC package's power distribution network (PDN) using on-chip circuit-based network analyzers can detect IC backside tampering. Our method is based on the fact that any attempt to expose the backside silicon substrate, such as the removal of the fan and heatsinks, leads to changes in the equivalent impedance of the package's PDN, and hence, scanning the package impedance will reveal if the package integrity has been violated. To validate our claims, we deploy an on-FPGA network analyzer on an AMD Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC manufactured with 16 nm technology, which is part of a multi-PCB system. We conduct a series of experiments at different temperatures, leveraging the difference of means as the statistical metric, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in detecting tamper events required to expose the IC backside silicon.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Anti-TamperFlip-Chip TechnologyIC BacksideImpedance CharacterizationPhysical AttacksPhysical Layer Security
Contact author(s)
tmosavirik @ wpi edu
stajik @ wpi edu
History
2024-09-10: revised
2024-04-25: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/631
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/631,
      author = {Tahoura Mosavirik and Shahin Tajik},
      title = {{BackMon}: {IC} Backside Tamper Detection using On-Chip Impedance Monitoring},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/631},
      year = {2024},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/631}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.