Engineer to develop methods to detect tampering in computer chips

Integrated circuits, or chips, provide the “brains” for virtually everything electronic, from cell phones, microwave ovens, and automobiles, to radar, computers, and fighter jets. Yet these circuits are extremely vulnerable to intentional tampering.

Armed with a new $400,000, five-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Mohammad Tehranipoor, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the School of Engineering, aims to develop techniques for identifying chips that have been deliberately compromised.

The funding will enable Tehranipoor to conduct research aimed at detecting and localizing so-called hardware “Trojans” in integrated circuits.

Named after the Trojan horse the ancient Greeks used to infiltrate and defeat the city of Troy, a hardware Trojan, says Tehranipoor, is a small piece of circuit designed to disable and/or destroy a system at some future time – often referred to as a “time bomb” – or to leak confidential information covertly to the enemy.

Tehranipoor says that, for economic reasons, most integrated circuits and microprocessors are designed, fabricated, and packaged overseas, rendering them more vulnerable to malicious activities, and raising serious concerns regarding possible threats to U.S. military systems, financial infrastructures, transportation security, and even household appliances.

The task of pre-testing chips is enormous, and although they typically undergo hundreds of millions of logic gate tests, not every chip and not every function is tested. Instead, tests focus on determining baseline metrics, such as how much power a chip consumes, what layout structures are inherent in the chip, and how well a chip performs the specific application functions needed. A maliciously hidden circuitry that produces no disruption in the chip’s normal functions will not necessarily be detected using these tests.

Verifying the trustworthiness of an integrated circuit, a process called IC authentication, is very complex, since there is no information about the type, size, and location of the Trojans.

Tehranipoor’s research centers on the types of cyber-assaults in which the attacker is assumed to maliciously alter the design before or during fabrication – a type of alteration that is extremely difficult to detect.