Building a Scalable, Quantifiable, and Repeatable Microelectronics Security Program

With an increasingly global supply chain, microelectronics are becoming an important issue for the United States to maintain both national competitiveness and security. The criticality expands from microelectronic design through manufacturing and is underpinned by the necessity for quantifiable assurance throughout the lifecycle. A central component to enable quantifiable assurance for microelectronics is to provide data artifacts that are quantifiable and measurable. This enables a security reviewer to analyze the data, without trusting anything about the microelectronic itself, and assess whether the microelectronic meets the required security and assurance for deployment into a government system. The Phase II developed Radix technology provides a core foundation that enables users to craft unique security requirements that can be executed in commercially available simulation and emulation systems used throughout DoD and the commercial semiconductor market. Radix’s unique information flow technology identifies security vulnerabilities in microelectronics that would otherwise be missed using traditional, more manual techniques to identify these weaknesses.  This proposal will extend the Phase II Radix technology to develop more infrastructure to enable quantifiable assurance with a key focus on aggregation of data in a manner that is analyzable and verifiable by a third party. Such analysis is critical to enable Quantifiable Assurance to meet the DoD’s mission objectives.