PROTECTS: Secure Provisioning of System-on-Chip Assets in Untrusted Testing Facility
Patanjali SLPSK, Jonathan Cruz, Sandip Kumar Ray, Swarup Bhunia · 2023
System-on-Chips contain variety of Hardware Security Assets (HSAs) to protect the components of the system against untrusted entities. Binding the HSAs to each SoC silicon instance during the testing stage, known as provisioning, is a critical step in SoC life cycle since improper provisioning could compromise the secure, trustworthy field operation of SoC and/or lead to crucial supply chain threats (e.g., piracy, cloning and reverse engineering). However, existing SoC provisioning methods do not scale to more advanced threat vectors under the emergent zero trust model that considers the foundry and testing/assembly process untrustworthy. We address this problem through a comprehensive framework, PROTECTS that enables secure provisioning of HSAs under zero trust. We demonstrate PROTECTS using a representative RISC-V based SoC with diverse set of HSAs. Our analysis shows that PROTECTS incurs minimal design overheads (0.36%, 0.54% and 0.0%) in area, power, and gate-count, respectively, for the entire SoC), while providing strong security guarantees.