Silicon scanning

With the globalisation of semiconductor manufacturing, integrated circuits become vulnerable to malevolent activities in the form of Trojan and backdoor insertion. An adversary can introduce Trojans into the design during fabrication stage by modifying the mask at a chip foundry. It can also be present inside third parties’ modules or blocks used in the design. Backdoors could be implemented by malicious insiders at the design house. Having a security related backdoor on a silicon chip jeopardises any efforts of adding software level protection. This is because an attacker can use the underlying hardware to circumvent the software countermeasures. If a bug is found in firmware programmed into an FPGA then it can be rectified by a firmware update. However, if the Trojan or backdoor is present in the silicon itself, then there is no way to remove the bugs other than replacing all the affected silicon chips or integrated circuits (IC) and the cost of such an operation is enormous.