Novel, Non-Intrusive Nanodeposition Technique for the Deposition of a Variety of Hardware Anti-Tamper Coatings

To date, much government and industry effort has focused on passive board and chip coatings and self-destruct concepts, but as the DoD AT organizations have evaluated them, the effectiveness of these types of techniques has been limited. Other concepts that have been assessed by the AT community include manufacturing processes, obfuscation, encryption, active coatings, volume protection and other such techniques. Our vision is to develop a more complete hardware/software AT solution. Therefore, this effort will focus on optimizing innovative nano-layer deposition techniques that may be utilized to non-intrusively deposit key sensing materials on devices of interest. These techniques and resulting materials may be utilized as integrated tamper sensing layers or individually packaged tamper sensing devices. A final product utilizing a variety of emerging nanomaterial deposition techniques and AT techniques will be developed. These include NanoMesh-N, NanoLock, and XS-SED – collectively referred to as Non-Intrusive Hardware Anti-Tamper Techniques (NIHATT).