Talk Title:

Making Integrated-Circuit Supply Chain Validation an Easier Task in the Context of Open-Source Silicon

Abstract:

Open-source Silicon makes mask set comparison an effective method to verify hardware backdoors were not introduced at the manufacturing stage into the Integrated-Circuits. The openness of the design translates in the availability of design files such as GDSII files that represent the mask set of a given IC. In that context, comparing them with extracted GDSII files from actual ICs using IC Reverse-Engineering techniques is a very potent way of assessing whether or not a backdoor was introduced into the chip during the manufacturing stage.

As such, this easier testability is a clear improvement compared to Close-Source Silicon devices where finding a golden sample is often an issue.

This talk will present the work performed to make supply chain validation through mask set recovery and comparison viable both in term of price and timing.

After an overview of the physical delayering process, the focus of the talk will be the image processing and data exploitation necessary to reach that goal of efficiency.

As such, picture distortion, tile stitching and layer alignement will be discussed to highlight the difficulties of a task that sounds so simple at first glance. The talk is also designed to show the solutions that were put in place. These are taking advantage of picture distortion correction mechanisms combined with feature extraction techniques using Machine Learning and dedicated pre- and post- processing. As a final note, the talk will conclude on the possibility of making an efficient assessment as well as fully characterizing a found backdoor.

KeyWords: Silicon, Open-source Silicon, Supply chain validation, hardware backdoor (Trojan) detection, Integrated-Circuit Reverse-Engineering, image processing

Speaker Bio:

Olivier Thomas studied Electrical Engineering (EE) and subsequently worked for a major semiconductor manufacturer designing analog circuits. Then, Olivier began to work in the field of Integrated Circuit (IC) security as the head of one of the world’s leading IC Analysis Labs. The lab primarily focused on securing future generation devices as well as developing countermeasures for current generation devices to combat piracy and counterfeiting. During this time Olivier helped develop many new and novel techniques for semi- and fully-invasive IC analysis. He has an extensive background in all the Failure Analysis techniques and equipment necessary for accessing vulnerable logic on a target device. Combined with his experience as an IC design engineer, Olivier continues to develop techniques for automating the analysis process. These techniques are not only applicable to lower-complexity devices such as smartcards, which are the traditional targets for IC analysis, but they are applicable to modern semiconductor devices with millions of gates, such as modern System-on-Chips (SoCs). Olivier is the creator of ChipJuice, a software toolchain that efficiently operates the recovery of hardware designs, independently from their technology node, architecture.