Radio Frequency (RF) Field Sensor for Integrated Circuits (IC)

Weapons systems managed by the MDA including the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) rely upon the integrity and security of complex Integrated Circuits (ICs) to control their functionality. Adversarial side-channel attacks to ICs greatly compromise this functionality as well as the security of Critical Program Information (CPI) stored in these ICs.Nokomis has definitively demonstrated that monitoring and detecting subtle changes and perturbations in a devices unintended radiated Radio Frequency (RF) emissions are extremely effective at determining its integrity, proper functioning, authenticity, and overall health.Miniaturization of Nokomis Hiawatha sensor to a System-on-a-Chip (SoC), called the Hiawatha-on-a-Chip (HoC), enables constant monitoring of low power RF emissions from protected devices to detect intrusion attempts in real time.Under this program, Nokomis will fabricate the prototype HoC sensor through a Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) Integrated Circuit(IC) fabrication process and demonstrate its ability to detect, identify, and diagnose the minute changes in the RF environment of computational assets caused by intrusion attempts.Nokomis is uniquely positioned to succeed in this effort, due to its numerous successes in this technology area, existing mature hardware base, the expertise of its technical team, and the success of the Phase I effort.