Bio-chemical Assay Locking to Thwart Bio-IP Theft
Abstract
It is expected that as digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) mature, the hardware design flow will begin to resemble the current practice in the semiconductor industry: design teams send chip layouts to third-party foundries for fabrication. These foundries are untrusted and threaten to steal valuable intellectual property (IP). In a DMFB, the IP consists of not only hardware layouts but also of the biochemical assays (bioassays) that are intended to be executed on-chip. DMFB designers therefore must defend these protocols against theft. We propose to “lock” biochemical assays by inserting dummy mix-split operations. We experimentally evaluate the proposed locking mechanism, and show how a high level of protection can be achieved even on bioassays with low complexity. We also demonstrate a new class of attacks that exploit the side-channel information to launch sophisticated attacks on the locked bioassay.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Nov 22, 2019
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3365579
Entities
People
- Jack Tang
- Krishnendu Chakrabarty
- Mohamed Ibrahim
- Ramesh Karri
- Sudip Poddar
- Sukanta Bhattacharjee
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- Duke University
- Intel Corporation
- National Science Foundation
- New York University