Hardware-Enabled Design for Security (DFS) Solutions

Speaker: Wei-Che Wang
Affiliation: Advisor: Prof. Puneet Gupta

Abstract:  The Integrated Circuit (IC) supply chains of modern companies often involve multiple business entities on a global scale, including offshore manufacturing, system integration and distribution of VLSI chips and systems. While the industry is trying to lower the risks imposed by the global supply chain production model, most existing techniques such as Physical Uncolonable Function (PUF), logic obfuscation, and hardware metering often suffer from their unreliability characteristics for their parametric nature or high implementation cost of the whole security system. Therefore, practical IC/IP Design for Security (DFS) solutions that are efficient and practical for the industry are still yet to be discovered.

In this dissertation, we study the behavior of PUFs and propose several sources of randomness to construct stability-guaranteed PUFs through Locally Enhanced Defectivity (LED) mechanisms, such as Directed Self Assembly (DSA) and transistor gate oxide breakdown. These PUFs are fabricated and demonstrated to be stable and random, which can be used as reliable sources of hardware root-of-trust for DFS techniques.

To further utilizing these stable PUFs, a secure lightweight entity authentication hardware primitive (SLATE) is proposed and shown to be much smaller than existing strong PUFs and lightweight ciphers. The proposed SLATE is a practical DFS solution for its extremely lightweight implementation and proven security from both empirical and theoretical perspectives.

Finally, the dissertation proposes an effective attack to reconstruct missing connections in 2.5D split manufacturing, which is a technique used to prevent reverse engineering from malicious foundry. A Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) based grouping algorithm depending purely on the circuit functionality is proposed to significantly reduce the runtime of Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solver, which is used to recover configuration keys of the connection network. Defense strategies of our attacks are also studied.

Biography: Wei-Che Wang received the B.S. degree in Computer Science from National Taiwan University, Taiwan in 2007 and the M.S. degree in Electronics Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, in 2009. He was with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) from 2009 to 2013 as a standard cell engineer. He joined UCLA as a PhD student in 2013.

For more information, contact Prof. Puneet Gupta (puneet@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Jun 05, 2018
12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Location:
E-IV Tesla Room #53-125
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095