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 o ... o F 1)(m) to a challenge m attests the canary's integrity. © 2012 International Association for Cryptologic Research.