Next-generation silicon chips based on spintronics could improve global cybersecurity:
Imagine a movie about a rogue employee who breaches security in a company that implants chips inside half of the world's computers. They embed a Trojan in systems around the globe and hold the world to ransom.
This is not unimaginable, says Rajat Kumar, a Ph.D. student in Yehia Massoud's lab at KAUST. "A single company currently supplies more than half of the world's chips, and nearly all of the most advanced chips," he confirms.
Massoud's group researches emerging technology that could make chips more secure. A recent project reports multifunctional logic gates that offer users a range of hardware security advantages. These include better control over their devices, tamper protection, watermarking and fingerprinting, and layout camouflage.
"Even if a semiconductor foundry is highly trustworthy, an untrusted entity in the supply chain could tamper with chips," Massoud says.
[...] As a secure alternative, Kumar and colleagues explored polymorphic gates made from nanoscale structures consisting of an oxide layer sandwiched between two ferromagnetic layers. These structures, known as a magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJ), are easily switchable by reversing the relative orientation of magnetic spins of the ferromagnetic layers. This spin-based control makes MTJs examples of spintronic devices.
Kumar and colleagues thought the switchable properties of MTJs meant that they could be used to create polymorphic gates, whose configuration users could check and reconfigure, overwriting any nefarious settings. They showed that MTJs function as polymorphic gates in a way that prevents tampering and intellectual property piracy due to their symmetry at both circuit and layout level symmetry, obscuring their layout and making them hard to reverse engineer.
Journal Reference:
Kumar, R., Divyanshu, D,. Khan, et al., Y. Polymorphic hybrid CMOS-MTJ logic gates for hardware security applications. Electronics, 12, 902 (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12040902
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Zinho on Tuesday April 25, @07:13PM
Let's see if I can cut through the buzzwords:
translation: we came up with a new way of manufacturing FPGAs and we hope everyone will switch from an etched-in-silicon static chip design to FPGAs because that would generate more sales for us.
translation: we can issue patches to our FPGA programming in case we botch the FDIV logic ^W^W^W^W^W bad guys infiltrate our infrastructure!
translation: we hope you weren't really paying attention when we said we would be releasing files to the public that give detailed instructions to our FPGAs on how to configure themselves. Nobody will ever figure out that we encrypted those files with ROTT-13. It's totally secure, trust us!
If users can check and reconfigure the gates on their processor, especially if it's something done easily and frequently, then that's as big of a supply chain risk as the chip manufacturing was, if not more.
I have no problem with pushing forward FGPA state of the art. Marketing it as inherently more secure than the standard model seems a bit specious.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday April 25, @09:13PM (5 children)
Frankly, I do not believe this AI-generated bullshit paper.
The reason for why not to believe is quite simple: every (even sequential) logic circuit is algebraizable. This works from early 50's.
So it is not possible to "hide a function" of a logic circuit because such algebraic representation is always (at least partially) solvable, this is the same principle as in logical equivalence of software and hardware in general, if both representations represent the same problem.
For any operation, you can build a pure logic network, you can write a program running on a simpler network, or a complete set of logic equations describing such operation, and they are all equivalent.
There is nowhere to hide in equations.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Wednesday April 26, @09:27AM (4 children)
Hardware trojans [wikipedia.org].
Doping-based ones are next-to-impossible to find.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday April 26, @06:06PM
First of all: keyboards. And no one in the public seems to care about these.
Non-transparent things will never be secure.
If you have a fancy box, it still may be a bomb inside.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Thursday April 27, @12:36PM (2 children)
I had to look that one up. [infosecurity-magazine.com]
Thanks, I learned something today.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday April 28, @04:19PM (1 child)
My pleasure.
The paper referred to in the Infosecurity Magazine article is online here (for now): Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans? Georg T. Becker, Francesco Regazzoni, Christof Paar, and Wayne P. Burleson [sharps.org]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday April 28, @04:28PM
However, this paper says the stealthy trojans can be detected: Reversing Stealthy Dopant-Level Circuits - Takeshi Sugawara, Daisuke Suzuki, Ryoichi Fujii, Shigeaki Tawa, Ryohei Hori, Mitsuru Shiozaki, and Takeshi Fujino [iacr.org]
But, given that it is a destructive technique, it is a little difficult to determine if the chip in your computer you are using now has been trojanned or not. If you check before using, you can't use the chip; and if you check after using, your secrets might have been compromised. Obviously, the thing to do is encrypt your message, decap the chip, check if it has been trojanned, and only send the message if the check is passed. Which is time consuming, and expensive, and likely operationally inconvenient.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday April 27, @11:42AM
I've gotten into more hot water by trusting simulations.
The problem is my models of real world phenomena aren't exact. But the computer is.
I got exactly what I wanted to see.
But when I built it, well I received a little more experience, which is what everyone gets as well when they didn't get what they wanted.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]