Enhancing Runtime Security in Heterogeneous System-in-Package Through a Chiplet-Based Root-of-Trust
Amit Mazumder Shuvo, Md Sami Ul Islam Sami, Jingbo Zhou, Farimah Farahmandi, Mark Mohammad Tehranipoor · 2025
As the semiconductor industry shifts to heterogeneous system-in-package (SiP) technologies to overcome the limitations of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling, the integration of modular intellectual property (IP) blocks (e.g., chiplets) significantly changes the threat vectors and introduces new system-level threats with increased vulnerability, such as remote fault injection (RFI) attacks, runtime malicious activity, and runtime probingbased attacks. Traditional security measures for monolithic system-on-chips (SoC) are inadequate due to their inability to either handle multiple runtime threats simultaneously or address the change of threat models due to the unique characteristics of heterogeneous systems. To address these challenges, we develop a reconfigurable root-of-trust (RoT) hardware security module to detect and respond to any RFI attack, runtime malicious activities, or probing-based attacks, thereby safeguarding the system's confidentiality and integrity without needing multiple and separate security solutions. Its reconfigurability allows a system designer to easily incorporate other runtime security features and upgrade the existing security features, providing reassurance about its long-term effectiveness. We utilize an FPGA board to implement and validate the effectiveness of the hardware security module in detecting several runtime threats with minimal overheads.