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Microprobing attacks against integrated circuit used in security-critical systems have become a serious concern. With the help of advanced circuit editing technology, an attacker can remove layers of materials and expose wires carrying security critical information for probing. Active shields constitute the most widely used approach to deter microprobing attacks. However, a number of vulnerabilities have been found in existing active shield designs; in particular, their weakness to tilted bypass attacks has yet to be addressed. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive investigation on tilted bypass attacks with a mathematical model to investigate how best an attacker can exploit geometric weakness of shield designs in three dimensions, as well as shield design techniques informed with such observations. We also include a numerical analysis with realistic parameters to validate theoretical predictions.more » « less
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Security-critical applications on integrated circuits (ICs) are threatened by microprobing attacks that extract sensitive information through focused ion beam (FIB) based milling. Existing countermeasures, such as active shield, analog shield and t-private circuit, have proven to be inefficient and provide limited resistance. In this paper, we propose a FIB-aware anti-probing physical design flow to reduce the vulnerability of security-critical nets in a design. Results show that our proposed technique can reduce the vulnerable exposed area on critical nets to probing attack by 90% in AES and DES modules with only 5% area overhead.more » « less
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