JTAG-based robust PCB authentication for protection against counterfeiting attacks
Andrew Hennessy, Yu Zheng, Swarup Bhunia · 2016
A Printed Circuit Board (PCB) provides the backbone for the interconnection of diverse electronic components into an electronic system. Unfortunately, the increased use of untrusted third-party PCB design/fabrication facilities and the long, distributed, supply chain of a PCB makes it extremely vulnerable to variety of integrity violation attacks, primarily different forms of counterfeiting, including cloning and recycling. In this paper, we propose a novel low-overhead and robust method to authenticate PCBs that utilizes an existing industry standard - IEEE 1149.1 or JTAG test infrastructure to extract high-quality signatures with high entropy. Since the signature encapsulates the intrinsic properties of the PCB components, it can be effectively used to identify malicious modifications of PCB components (e.g. replacing a chip) in a supply chain or during field operation. Measurement results with 30 custom fabricated test boards are promising in terms of uniqueness (48.34% inter-PCB hamming distance) and robustness (1.22% intra-PCB Hamming Distance) of 128-bit authentication signature.