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  1. Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable pace of innovation and performance improvements in integrated circuits (ICs), which have become indispensable in an array of critical applications ranging from military infrastructure to personal healthcare. Meanwhile, recent developments have brought physical security to the forefront of concern, particularly considering the valuable assets handled and stored within ICs. Among the various invasive attack vectors, micro-probing attacks have risen as a particularly menacing threat. These attacks leverage advanced focused ion beam (FIB) systems to enable post-silicon secret eavesdropping and circuit modifications with minimal traceability. As an evolved variant of micro-probing attacks, reroute attacks possess the ability to actively disable built-in shielding measures, granting access to the security-sensitive signals concealed beneath. To address and counter these emerging challenges, we introduce a layout-level framework known as Detour-RS. This framework is designed to automatically assess potential vulnerabilities, offering a systematic approach to identifying and mitigating exploitable weaknesses. Specifically, we employed a combination of linear and nonlinear programming-based approaches to identify the layout-aware attack costs in reroute attempts given specific target assets. The experimental results indicate that shielded designs outperform non-shielded structures against reroute attacks. Furthermore, among the two-layer shield configurations, the orthogonal layout exhibits better performance compared to the parallel arrangement. Furthermore, we explore both independent and dependent scenarios, where the latter accounts for potential interference among circuit edit locations. Notably, our results demonstrate a substantial near 50% increase in attack cost when employing the more realistic dependent estimation approach. In addition, we also propose time and gas consumption metrics to evaluate the resource consumption of the attackers, which provides a perspective for evaluating reroute attack efforts. We have collected the results for different categories of target assets and also the average resource consumption for each via, required during FIB reroute attack.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2025
  2. Microprobing attacks poses a serious threat to security-critical applications by enabling attackers to steal assets and/or secrets within integrated circuits (ICs).With the assistance of focused ion beam (FIB), microprobing attacks are even more powerful. Although there are some existing countermeasures like active shields, analog shields, and t-private circuits, the FIB’s capabilities are not taken into consideration and thus these countermeasures are inefficient and only provide limited resistance against the FIB-enhanced microprobing attacks. To counter the attack, we previously proposed a FIB-aware antiprobing physical design flow that utilizes computer-aided design (CAD) tools to detect and prevent microprobing attack from the IC front-side with minimal extra design effort. In this paper, we expand this flow to protect not only front-side of the IC, but provide simultaneous protection of both front-side and back-side. Results in an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) benchmark show that, by using the proposed flow, the vulnerable area exposed to front-side probing on security-critical nets is reduced to zero at low FIB aspect ratios with less than 2% timing and area overhead. 
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