SCARe: An SRAM-Based Countermeasure Against IC Recycling

• Published in: IEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems 2018-04, Vol.26 (4), p.744-755
• Main Authors: Guo, Zimu, Xu, Xiaolin, Rahman, Md. Tauhidur, Tehranipoor, Mark M., Forte, Domenic
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aging; Consumer electronics; Counterfeit; Degradation; Integrated circuits; physical unclonable function (PUF); Recycling; security; SRAM cells; static random-access memory (SRAM); system on chips (SoCs)
• ISSN: 1063-8210; 1557-9999
• DOI: 10.1109/TVLSI.2017.2777262

With the rapid growth of the electronics market, counterfeiting of integrated circuits (ICs), in particular IC recycling, has become a serious issue in recent years. Recycled ICs are those harvested from old systems and resold in the supply chain as new. Such ICs exhibit lower performance and shorter lifetime and, as a result, pose threats to the security and reliability of electronic systems. In this paper, we propose a recycled IC detection framework called static random-access memory (SRAM)-based countermeasure against IC recycling (SCARe) to detect the aging of SRAM cells. Our framework can be applied to both standalone SRAM chips and system on chips with embedded SRAM. For each SRAM under detection, statistical analysis is conducted to differentiate the recycled and new ICs. To mimic the practical aging scenario, 16 commodity SRAM chips from three different manufacturers and different technology nodes (e.g., 90, 110, and 130 nm) are stressed under high-temperature and supply-voltage conditions for different periods of time. The experimental results from new and aged SRAM chips, which represents recycled ICs, demonstrate that our proposed technology can achieve extremely high-detection success rate (no lower than 96.5%). The minimal in-field usage, which can be detected by SCARe, is 7 h.