CAREER: Backside Protection Against Contactless Optical Attacks on Integrated Circuits in Advanced Technology Nodes

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Today, the explosive demand for modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) and in particular the system-on-chips (SoCs) in different applications from automobiles to military, and critical infrastructures makes their security of paramount concern. With the advancements in packaging and the need for smaller and more power efficient devices, heterogenous integration becomes more attractive but makes the chip more vulnerable from backside. Existing research studies in this area are limited to few attack surfaces with no comprehensive framework. Current countermeasures are incompatible with the conventional IC and SoC design flow and are expensive in terms of both manufacturing cost and design overhead. The project's novelties are in (1) assessing the security vulnerabilities of modern ICs against “contactless optical attacks from backside” with a holistic security taxonomy and quantitative evaluation methods, and (2) providing a framework to develop proper countermeasures against optical probing attacks at circuit-, material- and packaging-levels. The project's broader importance is in different disciplines from electronics to material science for chip designers and students to better understand the correlation between data traffic in IC and the resulting physical signatures that could be used by an attacker to extract sensitive information through new education materials and advanced instrumentations. This project (1) investigates potential security vulnerabilities of modern ICs to backside optical attacks and develop security metrics to identify the vulnerable modules in a device; (2) develops low area and power overhead circuit-based solutions to detect and/or prevent optical probing, (3) develops material and packaging based countermeasures to mitigate the backside attacks, and finally (4) evaluates the proposed countermeasures against real attacks in silicon using commercial chips or fabricated prototypes with state-of-the-art optical setups.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.