Paper 2012/324 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2012/324 ↗

3D Hardware Canaries

Abstract

3D integration is a promising advanced manufacturing process offering a variety of new hardware security protection opportunities. This paper presents a way of securing 3D ICs using Hamiltonian paths as hardware integrity verification sensors. As 3D integration consists in the stacking of many metal layers, one can consider surrounding a security-sensitive circuit part by a wire cage. After exploring and comparing different cage construction strategies (and reporting preliminary implementation results on silicon), we introduce a "hardware canary". The canary is a spatially distributed chain of functions $F_i$ positioned at the vertices of a 3D cage surrounding a protected circuit. A correct answer $(F_n \circ \ldots \circ F_1)(m)$ to a challenge $m$ attests the canary's integrity.