Scientists, including of Indian origin, are developing a new chip that can detect malicious circuitry and prevent hardware viruses from sabotaging medical devices, and financial, military or government electronics.
Researchers including Siddharth Garg, assistant professor at the New York University, are developing a chip with both an embedded module that proves that its calculations are correct and an external module that validates the first module’s proofs.
With the outsourcing of microchip design and fabrication a worldwide USD 350 billion business, bad actors along the supply chain have many opportunities to install malicious circuitry in chips.
These “Trojan horses” look harmless but can allow attackers to sabotage public infrastructure, healthcare devices, and financial, military or government electronics.
While software viruses are easy to spot and fix with downloadable patches, deliberately inserted hardware defects are invisible and act surreptitiously.
For example, a secretly inserted “back door” function may allow attackers to alter or take over a device at a specific time.
Garg’s configuration, an example of an approach called “verifiable computing” (VC), keeps tabs on a chip’s performance and can spot telltale signs of Trojans.
The ability to verify has become vital in an electronics age without trust.
Under the system proposed by researchers, the verifying processor can be fabricated separately from the chip.
The chip designer then turns to a trusted foundry to build a separate, less complex module – an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), whose sole job is to validate the proofs of correctness generated by the internal module of the untrusted chip.