PSM: Ushering PCB Security Through System-level MEMS Integration (PSM)
Abstract
Modern electronic systems heavily depend on Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) to establish connections among various components such asintegrated circuits (ICs), sensors, and power supplies. Military, healthcare, and transportation industries heavily rely on PCBs for reliable computing, sensing, and actuation operations. However, due to the larger scale features of PCBs compared to ICs, they aremore vulnerable to unauthorized activities such as reverse engineering systems left on the battlefield or seized from a compromiseddevice, cloning, overproduction, and tampering. While current hardware assurance approaches mainly focus on ICs, attacks on PCBs can be executed without the need for high-energy metrology equipment typically required for IC attacks. In addition, there has been a concerning shift in high-volume PCB production over the past two decades, with a significant decline in the United States share. In 2021, the global revenue from PCB production surpassed $60 billion, but the United States now accounts for only 4% of this production, compared to its previous share of over 26%. This shift is primarily due to lower production costs in Asia, supported by foreign government subsidies. Outsourcing PCB production to untrusted locations raises concerns about hardware trust and assurance. It not only affects businesses but also poses risks to national security. This vulnerability underscores the importance of addressing hardware trust and security at the PCB level to mitigate risks associated with compromised electronic systems. Despite efforts to introducedefenses such as logic locking and physical unclonable function integration, the complexity of attack surfaces and capabilities continues to expand at a disproportionate rate compared to security remedies. The current situation necessitates significant advances in countermeasures to these risks and the adoption of new standards at the design, fabrication, and testing levels to keep control over the IP at all stages. Ushering PCB Security Through System-level MEMS Integration (PSM) aims to prevent PCB design reverse engineering by incorporating micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) into the design using 3D printing techniques. PSM proposes a unique approach to PCB security, obfuscating critical connections and complicating destructive and non-destructive analysis. MEMS integration improves security against hostile objectives like design theft, probing, X-ray RE, system-level counterfeiting, and hardware Trojan insertion, primarily through active and disguised hardware-level reconfigurability that enables post-fabrication PCB trace shuffling.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 15, 2023
- Source ID
- N000142412056
Entities
People
- Navid Asadi Zanjani
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Florida