Active defense against counterfeiting attacks through robust antifuse-based on-chip locks

The rapidly rising incidences of counterfeit Integrated Circuits (ICs) in the semiconductor supply chain pose a significant threat to the electronic industry. These ICs may suffer from functional, performance or reliability issues and can affect design houses, chip manufacturers, system designers as well as end users. The standard chip/package/system level tests are often inadequate in detecting various forms of counterfeit ICs. On the other hand, design approaches that enable IC authentication are often not attractive due to significant design effort, hardware overhead and test cost. In this paper, we propose a novel defense against counterfeiting attacks through a “chip locking approach”, where an IC is made non-operational by locking select pins through insertion of Antifuse (AF) devices in input/output circuitry. It can be unlocked through application of a hard-to-clone key. The key is internally stored in a onetime programmable non-volatile memory. The key storage and comparison circuit is protected against reverse engineering and side-channel analysis attacks. Through mathematical analysis and simulation results, we demonstrate that the proposed mechanism provides high level of protection against all major forms of counterfeiting attacks (reselling, remarking and cloning) at ultralow overhead (<; 0.01% area).