Active Shield IP
Attacks against digital circuits can be performed by directly tampering with the internal structure of the device. These attacks are intrusive and include attempts to directly probe or force signals, remove, add or modify features on the chip (metal routing, transistors).
Secure-IC’s Active Shield technology is designed to deter these intrusive attacks by placing a mesh over the sensitive parts of the circuit and actively monitoring the integrity of the mesh. This countermeasure protects the circuit’s features such as metal routing and transistors that are beneath the mesh, from undetected access or modification by the front-side, including:
- Wire micro-probing to read or force an equipotential;
- Wire cutting (e.g. alarms, entropy source disconnection from a true random number generator, etc.);
- Wire re-routing;
- Burnt fuses opening;
- ROM Altering.
To further deter intrusive attacks, the mesh is actively monitored using random cryptographically generated patterns to detect integrity violations. Using this technology, modifying and rerouting the mesh becomes very costly as the attacker has to reroute many wires to avoid detection. In addition, the attacker cannot predict the data flowing through the shield mesh as it is output by a cryptographic block cipher.
Active Shield IP offers the following features:
- Anti-tamper solution with a mesh placed on the sensitive parts of the circuit and actively monitored
- Uses cryptographically generated random patterns to detect integrity violations
- Antenna-effect safe
- Ready for security certification (including Common Criteria)
- Fully digital and designed with a standard cells library
- Mesh designed with scripts
- Mesh can be interleaved with P/G network in topmost layers (no need to sacrifice a layer)
- Compatible with clock gating to reduce power consumption
- Transferable to any design kit
- Lightweight
- No post-design calibration
- Easy to integrate into the system