Robust counterfeit PCB detection exploiting intrinsic trace impedance variations

The long and distributed supply chain of printed circuit boards (PCBs) makes them vulnerable to different forms of counterfeiting attacks. Existing chip-level integrity validation approaches cannot be readily extended to PCB. In this paper, we address this issue with a novel PCB authentication approach that creates robust, unique signatures from a PCB based on process-induced variations in its trace impedances. The approach comes at virtually zero design and hardware overhead and can be applied to legacy PCBs. Experiments with two sets of commercial PCBs as well as a set of custom designed PCBs show that the proposed approach can obtain unique authentication signature with inter-PCB hamming distance of 47.94% or higher.