Technology for Trusted Circuits

Future weapons and defense systems used by the DoD are critical elements to the armed forces and national security. Therefore, it is conceivable that during the design and manufacturing process IC's are susceptible to the covert addition of intentional malicious attack functionality that compromises the integrity of the hardware. This embedded functionality could serve purposes similar to software viruses, operating system backdoors, or Trojan horse mechanisms for system access. DoD customers must be able to verify the intended functionality while ensuring the trusted nature of the delivered IC's. Currently, this is difficult or impossible to do in a non-destructive manner, which demands the need for new improved methods of establishing trust in the design and verification stages of development. Our proposed Obtaining Circuit Trust Through Active NonDestructive Evaluation (OCT2ANE) solution provides innovations in three key areas: System Design and Capture, Automated Manufacturing Integration and Non-destructive Verification. Our solution is consistent with EDAptiver Systems Engineering methodology and tool suite which provides a framework for the proposed solution. This methodology is based upon the premise that system requirements can be captured unambiguously in a computer-sensible manner, thereby enabling computer interpretation and analysis of these requirements.