Invited talk: A foundry’s view of hardware security
2017
Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. A system is as secure as its weakest link. Current computing systems employ a multiple-layer approach to build a trusted environment. At the bottom of this multi-layer approach is a hardware root of trust which other layers build upon. It is important to assure this root of trust is secure and free from any weakness. Recently there is surge of research topics on hardware security. In this talk we first narrow the topic a bit and outline a tighter definition of hardware security. We, then, focus on a few topics related to this tighter definition of hardware security including hardware Trojans and IC counterfeiting. On hardware Trojans, we first explain why it is so hard to prevent hardware Trojans. While we are at it we will argue why it is very unlikely for a reputable foundry such as TSMC to plant them. On IC counterfeiting, there have been work on employing Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) to prevent counterfeiting. In this talk we will explain the difference between testing of these hardware security elements from testing of standard logic elements. We will also clarify that foundry is in the best position to design and build these elements such as Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Physical Random Bits Generators (PRBGs).