The unbuffered interface and distributed nature of the power grid defines a natural passive embedded structure on which robust security and trust hardware primitives can be built. In this project, we design a simple, low overhead hardware primitives and support infrastructures that serve multiple roles simultaneously, e.g., to implement a physically unclonable function for key generation and to implement a signal calibration technique to enhance the detection resolution of hardware Trojans. We also evaluate hardware primitives for improving the robustness of the arbiter PUF and for detecting delay anomalies introduced by Trojans. The hardware primitives and techniques provides a powerful new set of tools and techniques to deal with existing and future challenges in hardware security and trust. more...

The focus of this research project is on developing, implementing and validating embedded test and sense (ETS) structures designed to measure regional variations in passive components, such as resistance, and in the delay and power consumption characteristics of active components (transistors). The data collected and analyzed from the ETS structures can be used to correlate models to hardware, assist with understanding the source of leakage power and delay variations, and aid in distinguishing systematic sources of process variations and defects from random sources for applications that target improving parametric and functional yield. more...