Integrated Circuits (ICs) are the target of diverse attacks during their lifetime. Fabrication-time attacks, such as the insertion of Hardware Trojans, can give an adversary access to privileged data and/or the means to corrupt the IC's internal computation. Post-fabrication attacks, where the end-user takes a malicious role, also attempt to obtain privileged information through means such as fault injection and probing. Taking these threats into account and at the same time, this paper proposes a methodology for Security-Aware Layout Synthesis (SALSy), such that ICs can be designed with security in mind in the same manner as power-performance-area (PPA) metrics are considered today, a concept known as security closure. Furthermore, the trade-offs between PPA and security are considered and a chip is fabricated in a 65nm CMOS commercial technology for validation purposes - a feature not seen in previous research on security closure. Measurements on the fabricated ICs indicate that SALSy promotes a modest increase in power in order to achieve significantly improved security metrics.

The globalization of the semiconductor industry has introduced security challenges to Integrated Circuits (ICs), particularly those related to the threat of Hardware Trojans (HTs) - malicious logic that can be introduced during IC fabrication. While significant efforts are directed towards verifying the correctness and reliability of ICs, their security is often overlooked. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework that integrates a suite of methodologies for both front-end and back-end stages of design, aimed at enhancing the security of ICs. Initially, we outline a systematic methodology to transform existing verification assets into potent security checkers by repurposing verification assertions. To further improve security, we introduce an innovative methodology for integrating online monitors during physical synthesis - a back-end insertion providing an additional layer of defense. Experimental results demonstrate a significant increase in security, measured by our introduced metric, Security Coverage (SC), with a marginal rise in area and power consumption, typically under 20%. The insertion of online monitors during physical synthesis enhances security metrics by up to 33.5%. This holistic framework offers a comprehensive defense mechanism across the entire spectrum of IC design.

Computer-aided design (CAD) tools traditionally optimize "only" for power, performance, and area (PPA). However, given the wide range of hardware-security threats that have emerged, future CAD flows must also incorporate techniques for designing secure and trustworthy integrated circuits (ICs). This is because threats that are not addressed during design time will inevitably be exploited in the field, where system vulnerabilities induced by ICs are almost impossible to fix. However, there is currently little experience for designing secure ICs within the CAD community. This contest seeks to actively engage with the community to close this gap. The theme is security closure of physical layouts, that is, hardening the physical layouts at design time against threats that are executed post-design time. Acting as security engineers, contest participants will proactively analyse and fix the vulnerabilities of benchmark layouts in a blue-team approach. Benchmarks and submissions are based on the generic DEF format and related files. This contest is focused on the threat of Trojans, with challenging aspects for physical design in general and for hindering Trojan insertion in particular. For one, layouts are based on the ASAP7 library and rules are strict, e.g., no DRC issues and no timing violations are allowed at all. In the alpha/qualifying round, submissions are evaluated using first-order metrics focused on exploitable placement and routing resources, whereas in the final round, submissions are thoroughly evaluated (red-teamed) through actual insertion of different Trojans.

Globalization in the semiconductor industry enables fabless design houses to reduce their costs, save time, and make use of newer technologies. However, the offshoring of Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication has negative sides, including threats such as Hardware Trojans (HTs) - a type of malicious logic that is not trivial to detect. One aspect of IC design that is not affected by globalization is the need for thorough verification. Verification engineers devise complex assets to make sure designs are bug-free, including assertions. This knowledge is typically not reused once verification is over. The premise of this paper is that verification assets that already exist can be turned into effective security checkers for HT detection. For this purpose, we show how assertions can be used as online monitors. To this end, we propose a security metric and an assertion selection flow that leverages Cadence JasperGold Security Path Verification (SPV). The experimental results show that our approach scales for industry-size circuits by analyzing more than 100 assertions for different Intellectual Properties (IPs) of the OpenTitan System-on-Chip (SoC). Moreover, our detection solution is pragmatic since it does not rely on the HT activation mechanism.

One of the most popular methods for reliability assessment of digital circuits is Fault Injection (FI) in which the behavior of the circuit is simulated in presence of faults. In this paper, we present a survey of FI techniques as well as classifying these techniques considering different aspects and criteria to bring out their similarities and differences. The goal of this paper is to help the researchers and reliable circuit designers in gaining insights into the state-of-art in FI techniques and motivate them to further improve these techniques for more efficient reliability evaluation of digital circuit designs of tomorrow.