Hardware Assurance

The term hardware assurance has been circulating for the past couple of years.  This term refers to assurance that the hardware you have is the hardware you think you paid for.  Counterfeit electronic hardware has become a big problem for the military---they pay big money for equipment that turns out to be fraudulent and non-functional.  Companies are increasingly concerned about the effects of counterfeit hardware on their bottom line---not only do they lose the sale to the counterfeit, but they often have to pick up the warranty costs for those counterfeits, too.

At the most basic level, hardware assurance ensures that components have not been substituted.  One way to provide such assurance is through supply chain management: auditing, custody chain tracking, etc. SAE has developed a standard, AS5553A, for the documentation and procedures to be followed to ensure a reliable supply of components from suppliers.  That standard, of course, needs to be followed not just by your supplier but by their suppliers as well.

Programmable memories are, of course, an easy way to attack programmable devices.  Andrew Appel of Princeton University has demonstrated the ease with which ROMs on New Jersey's voting machines can be substituted, allowing the voting machine to be reprogrammed.

A more subtle version of this problem rears its head in the semiconductor world.   If you give a set of masks to a semiconductor manufacturer, how do you know that they manufactured the circuit you gave them?  Not only may they have manufactured junk, but they may have introduced Trojan horses into your hardware that they can exploit at later dates.  Various techniques have been developed to deal with this problem.  Netlists can be used as watermarks to verify that the design has not been changed.

Yet another subtlety comes into play for embedded devices---how do you know that a device in the field hasn't been swapped?  Even if a device leaves your plant with the correct hardware, it may have been compromised after installation. Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) can be used to generate a unique signature for each device that can be checked in the field.