PCBench: Benchmarking of Board-Level Hardware Attacks and Trojans

Abstract

Most modern electronic systems are hosted by printed circuit boards (PCBs), making them a ubiquitous system component that can take many di erent shapes and forms. In order to achieve a high level of economy of scale, the global supply chain of electronic systems has evolved into disparate segments for the design, fabrication, assembly, and testing of PCB boards and their various associated components. As a consequence, the modern PCB supply chain exposes many vulnerabilities along its di erent stages, allowing adversaries to introduce malicious alterations to facilitate boardlevel attacks. As an emerging hardware threat, the attack and defense techniques at the board level have not yet been systemically explored and thus require a thorough and comprehensive investigation. In the absence of standard board-level attack benchmark, current research on perspective countermeasures is likely to be evaluated on proprietary variants of ad-hoc attacks, preventing credible and verifiable comparison among di erent techniques. Upon this request, in this paper, we will systematically define and categorize a broad range of board-level attacks. For the first time, the attack vectors and construction rules for board-level attacks are developed. A practical and reliable board-level attack benchmark generation scheme is also developed, which can be used to produce references for evaluating countermeasures. Finally, based on the proposed approach, we have created a comprehensive set of board-level attack benchmarks for open-source release.