Five Resources To Learn More About Silicon Trojan, Chip Counterfeits And Other Hardware Risks

Hardware security seems to be once more in the news with The Register publishing an article on 18 March titled "Europe, US warn of fake-chip danger to national security, critical systems" and Reuters publishing an article on 1 April titled "The chip challenge: Keeping Western semiconductors out of Russian weapons".

Without getting much into geopolitics, here are five resources on various aspects related to hardware risks like chip (integrated circuits) counterfeits, Silicon Trojan etc, which we hope will help give both the bigger picture as well as in-depth analysis on certain aspects.

#1. A YouTube video was released by Asianometry channel on 1 April 2022. It also has a brief overview of the flow that leads to chip manufacturing though not in detail, before moving on to giving an overview of some of the security threats.

#2. For those who enjoy reading papers that give a nice and well arranged summary of the various aspects related to the challenges as well as some of their suggested detection and prevention methods, this paper from 2015 will be a good read.

#3. On the specific topic of Hardware Trojan (or Silicon Trojan), the Australian Department of Defence had published a detailed study with classifications such as ‘Hybrid Silicon Trojan’, ‘Independent Silicon Trojan’ etc. In section 4.5 of this study, implementation examples are given for Trojans in Processor (CPU), hard drive and memory. Later, various possibilities of monitoring and securing against these threats are also discussed.

#4. Side-channel attacks, a subset of non-invasive or semi-invasive attacks, are among favourite attack types due to relative simplicity of their execution compared to invasive attacks. This paper covers methods to improve physical security of microchips against side channel attacks.

#5. This paper explains the various chip counterfeit types and offers avoidance measures like providing chip ID and/or package ID by various means.

As India embarks on its journey to have commercial semiconductor fabs opened on its soil, many of these aspects become important to be studied and implemented appropriately. Before the policy announcements Swarajyamag had also published an article titled: "Some Strategic, Defence And Data Security Reasons For #FabInIndia".

For the Silicon fabs, given that the chips need to be produced in big volumes for the high investment fabs to be break even as well for the technology to reach a yield level of more than 90 per cent, globally governments do not prefer running the fabs directly.

Instead they work out programmes like Trusted Foundry with commercial fabs (GlobalFoundries is a Trusted Foundry partner for US than can supply up to 12nm) and RAMP-C (focused on 7nm and below technologies, the C stands for Commercial and the deal has been awarded to Intel and Qualcomm for fab and fabless).