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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