Chip-to-Chip Zero-Trust Security

Abstract

verifying and not trusting concepts. As more adversary attack methods become increasingly sophisticated, ensuring the Integrated Circuits (IC) security and their authenticity has become paramount, especially in critical systems. Most ICs these days are manufactured in untrusted third foundries for lower cost and more efficient production of IC. The issue with untrusted third foundries is intellectual theft of IC design and hardware-level trojan implementation. Recently research has been conducted on chip-to-chip zero-trust security, eliminating the risk of using untrusted third foundries for IC production. Most current research on zero-trust security uses SRAM-based Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for chip-to-chip security, which has degrading attack and authentication efficiency issues when power resetting the SRAM. Another area of research is using Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM), which offers reliable authentication for chip-to-chip zero-trust security. SPDM offers a reliable solution for achieving zero-trust security on the hardware level. Unfortunately, little research has been done on the implementation of the SPDM protocol. This research investigates the implementation of SPDM for chip-to-chip zero-trust security, highlighting its advantages and analyzing the threats that could be faced when implemented in a real application. The main contributions of this thesis are:
1. Compiling, optimizing, and testing the SPDM protocol.
2. Implementing SPDM I2C communication using Raspberry Pi devices.
3. Performing a threat modeling analysis on the SPDM implementation.
4. Providing mitigation against the identified threats.

Date of Award	Aug 2023
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Abdulhadi Shoufan (Supervisor)