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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: 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.