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| Image: Flickr User - Jakub T. Jankiewicz |
With the outsourcing of microchip design and fabrication worldwide, a $350 billion business, bad actors along the supply chain have many opportunities to install malicious circuitry in chips. These "Trojan horses" look harmless but can allow attackers to sabotage healthcare devices; public infrastructure; and financial, military, or government electronics.
Siddharth Garg, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and fellow researchers are developing a unique solution: a chip with both an embedded module that proves that its calculations are correct and an external module that validates the first module's proofs.
While software viruses are easy to spot and fix with downloadable patches, deliberately inserted hardware defects are invisible and act surreptitiously. For example, a secretly inserted "back door" function could allow attackers to alter or take over a device or system at a specific time. Garg's configuration, an example of an approach called "verifiable computing" (VC), keeps tabs on a chip's performance and can spot telltale signs of Trojans.
Read the full story at SpaceDaily