Dynamic Authentication-Based Secure Access to Test Infrastructure

The complexity of modern Systems-on-Chips is steadily increasing, which poses hard challenges for testing. In order to be able to face those challenges, several standards have been proposed through history, such as the latest IEEE 1687 on Reconfigurable Scan Networks (RSNs), which allows dynamic configuration of the test infrastructure for an easier access to embedded instruments and data. This ease of access, however, may constitute a serious threat from the point of view of security, as it may be used by an attacker as an entry point to the internal state of the circuit, especially if the test infrastructure is reused for life-time testing. Some approaches exist to protect the access, but their performances and security levels are limited by the legacy view of test as a static process. In this paper, we propose an innovative solution that exploits the dynamic nature of the IEEE 1687 standard to obtain an Authentication-based Secure Access framework able to provide a trusted and personalized interface to the test infrastructure depending on user-defined security levels.