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Today’s globalized supply chain for electronics design, fabrication, and distribution has resulted in a proliferation of counterfeit chips. Recycled and remarked chips are the most common counterfeit types in the market, and prior work has shown that physical inspection is the best approach to detect them. However, it can be time-consuming, expensive, and destructive while relying on the use of subject matter experts. This paper proposes a low-cost, automated detection technique that examines surface variations within and between chips to identify defective chips. Further, it can estimate the location of the defects for additional analysis. The proposed method only requires a cheap IR camera-based setup to capture images of the chip package surface and is completely unsupervised and non-destructive. Experimental results on 25 chips in our lab demonstrate 100% detection accuracy.
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COUNTERFOIL: Verifying Provenance of Integrated Circuits using Intrinsic Package Fingerprints and Inexpensive Cameras
Counterfeit integrated circuits are responsible for billions of dollars in losses to the semiconductor industry each year, and jeopardize the reliability of critical systems that unwittingly rely on them. Counterfeit parts, which are primarily recycled, test rejects, or legitimate but regraded, have to date been found in a number of systems, including critical defense systems. In this work, we present COUNTERFOIL – an anti-counterfeiting system based on enrolling and authenticating intrinsic features of the molded packages that enclose a majority of semiconductor chips sold on the market. Our system relies on computer-readable labels, inexpensive cameras, imaging processing using OpenCV, and digital signatures, to enroll and verify chip packages. We demonstrate our approach on a dataset from over 100 chips. We show that our technique is effective and reliable for verifying provenance under a variety of settings, and evaluate the robustness of the package features by using different imaging platforms, and by wearing the chips with silicon carbide polishing grit in a rock tumbler. We show that, even if an adversary steals the exact mold used to produce an enrolled chip package, he will have limited success in being able to counterfeit the chip.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1749845
- PAR ID:
- 10211386
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 29th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 20)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1255-1272
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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