PCB Security Modules for Reverse-Engineering Resistant Design

As the crisis of confidence and trust in overseas foundries arises, the industry and academic community are paying increasing attention to Printed Circuit Board (PCB) security. PCB, the backbone of any electronic system hardware, always draws attackers’ attention as it carries system and design information. Numerous ways of PCB tampering (e.g., adding/replacing a component, eavesdropping on a trace and bypassing a connection) can lead to more severe problems, such as Intellectual Property (IP) violation, password leaking, the Internet of Things (IoT) attacks or even more. This paper proposes a technique of active self-defense PCB modules with zero performance overhead. Those protection modules will only be activated when the boards are exposed to the attacks. A set of PCBs with proposed protection modules is fabricated and tested to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the techniques.