Computer Engineering Commons^™

Towards Multipronged On-Chip Memory And Data Protection From Verification To Design And Test, Senwen Kan, Jennifer Dworak

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Modern System on Chips (SoCs) generally include embedded memories, and these memories may be vulnerable to malicious attacks such as hardware trojan horses (HTHs), test access port exploitation, and malicious software. This dissertation contributes verification as well as design obfuscation solutions aimed at design level detection of memory HTH circuits as well as obfuscation to prevent HTH triggering for embedded memory during functional operation. For malicious attack vectors stemming from test/debug interfaces, this dissertation presents novel solutions that enhance design verification and securitization of an IJTAG based test access interface. Such solutions can enhance SoC protection by preventing memory test …

Enhanced Security Utilizing Side Channel Data Analysis, Michael Taylor

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The physical state of a system is affected by the activities and processes in which it is tasked with carrying out. In the past there have been many instances where such physical changes have been exploited by bad actors in order to gain insight into the operational state and even the data being held on a system. This method of side channel exploitation is very often effective due to the relative difficulty of obfuscating activity on a physical level. However, in order to take advantage of side channel data streams one must have a detailed working knowledge of how a …

Using A Light-Based Power Source To Defeat Power Analysis Attacks, Remus Valentin Tumac

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Power analysis attacks exploit the correlation between the information processed by an electronic system and the power consumption of the system. By powering an electronic system with an optical power source, we can prevent meaningful information from being leaked to the power pins and captured in power traces. The relatively constant current draw of the optical power source hides any variability in the power consumption of the target system caused by the logic gates' switching activity of the system as observed at the power pins. This thesis will provide evidence to show that using an optical power source should make …

A 2.56 Gbps Serial Wireline Transceiver That Supports An Auxiliary Channel And A Hybrid Line Driver To Compensate Large Channel Loss, Xiaoran Wang

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Serial transceiver links are widely used for high-speed point-to-point communications. This dissertation describes two transceiver link designs for two different applications.

In serial wireline communications, security is an increasingly important factor to concern. Securing an information processing system at the application and system software layers is regarded as a necessary but incomplete defense against the cyber security threats. In this dissertation, an asynchronous serial transceiver that is capable of transmitting and receiving an auxiliary data stream concurrently with the primary data stream is described. The transceiver instantiates the auxiliary data stream by modulating the phase of the primary data without …

Investigating The Effect Of Detecting And Mitigating A Ring Oscillator-Based Hardware Trojan, Lakshmi Ramakrishnan

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The outsourcing of the manufacturing process of integrated circuits to fabrications plants all over the world has exposed these chips to several security threats, especially at the hardware level. There have been instances of malicious circuitry, such as backdoors, being added to circuits without the knowledge of the chip designers or vendors. Such threats could be immensely powerful and dangerous against confidentiality, among other vulnerabilities.

Defense mechanisms against such attacks have been probed and defense techniques have been developed. But with the passage of time, attack techniques have improved immensely as well. From directly observing the inputs or outputs, adversaries …

Improving System-On-Chip Test Networks For: Bandwidth, Security, And Power, Saurabh Gupta

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Modern System-on-Chips (SoCs) provide benefits such as reduction in overall system cost, and size, increased performance, and lower power consumption. Increasing complexity of these Integrated Circuits (ICs) has resulted in a higher probability of manufacturing defects. Manufacturing defects can result in the faulty operation of a system. Thus, it is essential to test an IC after it is manufactured to detect any possible faults in it. These SoCs include on-chip embedded instruments that can be used for test, debug, diagnosis, validation, monitoring, characterization, configuration, or functional purposes. IEEE 1687 Std. (IJTAG) provides a standard interface for the reconfigurable access and …

Genetic Algorithms Vs. Simulated Annealing: A Comparison Of Approaches For Solving The Circuit Partitioning Problem, Theodore W. Manikas, James T. Cain

Computer Science and Engineering Research

An important stage in circuit design is placement, where components are assigned to physical locations on a chip. A popular contemporary approach for placement is the use of simulated annealing. While this approach has been shown to produce good placement solutions, recent work in genetic algorithms has produced promising results. The purpose of this study is to determine which approach will result in better placement solutions.

A simplified model of the placement problem, circuit partitioning, was tested on three circuits with both a genetic algorithm and a simulated annealing algorithm. When compared with simulated annealing, the genetic algorithm was found …