ABSTRACT Producing Trustworthy Hardware Using Untrusted Components, Personnel and Resources

Computer security is a full-system property, and attackers will always go after the weakest link in a system. In modern computing systems, the hardware supply chain is an obvious and vulnerable point of attack. The ever-increasing complexity of hardware systems, along with the globalization of the hardware supply chain, has made it unreasonable to trust hardware. Hardware-based attacks, known as backdoors, are easy to implement and can undermine the security of systems built on top of compromised hardware. Operating systems and other software can only be secure if they can trust the underlying hardware systems. The full supply chain for creating hardware includes multiple processes, which are often addressed in disparate threads of research, but which we consider as one unified process. On the front-end side, there is the soft design of hardware, along with validation and synthesis, to ultimately create a netlist, the document that defines the physical layout of hardware. On the back-end side, there is a physical fabrication process, where a chip is produced at a foundry from a supplied netlist, followed in some cases by post-fabrication testing. Producing a trustworthy chip means securing this process from the early design stages through to the post-fabrication tests