Project Details
Projekt
OnE-Secure: Securing State-of-the-Art Chips Against High-Resolution Contactless Optical and Electron-Beam Probing Attacks
Applicants
Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Brand; Professor Dr. Rolf Drechsler; Professor Dr. Jean-Pierre Seifert; Dr.-Ing. Frank Sill Torres
Subject Area
Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 535696594
This project belongs to Area 1 (Nano-electronics for security) and the interdisciplinary group IG3 (Resilience against physical attacks) of this call’s matrix. Physical hardware attacks, especially optical attacks through the chip’s backside, have shown to be a threat to secret data and intellectual property stored on integrated circuits (ICs). Techniques from IC failure analysis, like optical probing (OP), can extract cryptographic keys, configuration data, or other secrets. Recently, due to the demand in the failure analysis (FA) industry for higher resolving tools, electron beam (E-beam) probing has been gaining more attention. Although the threat of attacks is known, no relevant countermeasures have been deployed in commercial chips so far. Following this observation, this project aims to explore methods that can protect future nano-circuits from ”Optical and E-beam” (OnE) probing attacks. By combining the expertise gained in the OptiSecure and the nanoEBeam projects from the first call into a single project with four partners, this unified project continues researching alternative chip designs that are robust against both of the aforementioned techniques. In this regard, a simulator for E-beam probing will be developed to predict measurement results and, therefore, support the development of countermeasures. Furthermore, the project will investigate new attack vectors of OnE probing, apply OnE probing to the detection of hardware Trojans, and apply formal and non-formal verification methods to prove the security of circuits against OnE attacks.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
