Heterogeneity Of 3DICs As A Security Vulnerability

A new technical paper titled “Harnessing Heterogeneity for Targeted Attacks on 3-D ICs” was published by Drexel University.

Abstract
“As 3-D integrated circuits (ICs) increasingly pervade the microelectronics industry, the integration of heterogeneous components presents a unique challenge from a security perspective. To this end, an attack on a victim die of a multi-tiered heterogeneous 3-D IC is proposed and evaluated. By utilizing on-chip inductive circuits and transistors with low voltage threshold (LVT), a die based on CMOS technology is proposed that includes a sensor to monitor the electromagnetic (EM) emissions from the normal function of a victim die, without requiring physical probing. The adversarial circuit is self-powered through the use of thermocouples that supply the generated current to circuits that sense EM emissions. Therefore, the integration of disparate technologies in a single 3-D circuit allows for a stealthy, wireless, and non-invasive side-channel attack. A thin-film thermo-electric generator (TEG) is developed that produces a 115 mV voltage source, which is amplified 5 × through a voltage booster to provide power to the adversarial circuit. An on-chip inductor is also developed as a component of a sensing array, which detects changes to the magnetic field induced by the computational activity of the victim die. In addition, the challenges associated with detecting and mitigating such attacks are discussed, highlighting the limitations of existing security mechanisms in addressing the multifaceted nature of vulnerabilities due to the heterogeneity of 3-D ICs.”

Find the technical paper here. Published June 2024.

Alec Aversa and Ioannis Savidis. 2024. Harnessing Heterogeneity for Targeted Attacks on 3-D ICs. In Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2024 (GLSVLSI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 246–251. https://doi.org/10.1145/3649476.3660385.