Non-Energetics-Based Self-Destruct Mechanisms

The Phase II program continues a highly successful Phase I, where a silent, unobservable, non-energetic means directly incorporated within electronics completely obliterate IC die within microseconds. The destruct is so extensive as to deny, even with the most sophisticated reverse engineer techniques, ability to derive any information about the chip or its functions. Phase II effort focus is on developing optimized device integration of the demonstrated techniques with die of interest and many common package types. It will be shown that the technique can be covertly integrated into die packaging as to be inaccessible by an adversary. It will be shown that it enables a low cost solution to destroying all the security sensitive electronics components at the push of a button. The effort will include (i) ensuring self-destruct capability operates in a fail-safe mode, denying ability to bypass the protection by interrupting power, (ii) ensuring that any tamper event involving one component can trigger self-destruct of selectable set of security sensitive components. Phase II will also demonstrate various levels of autodestruct including autonomous, semi-autonomous, and distributed (where the destruct command is executed by on-board [boundary scan] monitoring and/or higher level system decision tree).