Protecting assets against information leakage is crucial to ensure System-on-Chip (SoC) security. This paper introduces a Time and Distance-based security metric (TDM) to assess information leakage risks across hardware Intellectual Properties (IPs) in SoC architectures. TDM quantifies both asset exposure time and spatial proximity to external threats, identifying vulnerable locations and critical timings. Using graph-based analysis, we map data flow, evaluating risk based on how long and how closely sensitive data resides near output ports. Applied to five open-source designs, TDM effectively enhances SoC security by measuring susceptibility to threats.

Fault-injection attacks have become a major concern for hardware designs, primarily due to their powerful capability in tampering with critical locations in a device to cause violation of its integrity, confidentiality, and availability. Researchers have proposed a number of physical and architectural countermeasures against fault-injection attacks; however, these techniques usually come with large overhead and design efforts making them difficult to use in practice. In addition, the current electronic design automation (EDA) tools are not fully equipped to support vulnerability assessment against fault-injection attacks at the design-time for secure hardware development. To perform a design-time (i.e., presilicon) evaluation of such attacks, a designer should be aware of various security vulnerabilities and must perform a tedious manual design review, which is time-consuming and hard to ensure effectiveness. Therefore, it is very important to develop an automatic assessment framework to identify the most security-critical locations in a design to fault-injection attacks and place emphasis on protecting those locations. In this article, we propose an automated framework for fault-injection vulnerability assessment of designs at gate-level, while considering the design-specific security properties (SPs) using novel models and metrics. The proposed framework identifies the faults that can violate the SPs of the design. As a result, applying local countermeasures will be more effective and the protection overhead will be reduced significantly. Our experimental results on the SP of AES, RSA, and SHA implementations show that the security threat from fault-injection attacks can be significantly mitigated by protecting the identified critical locations, which are less than 0.6% of the design.

The ever-increasing cost and complexity of cutting-edge manufacturing and test processes have migrated the semiconductor industry towards a globalized business model. With many untrusted entities involved in the supply chain located across the globe, original intellectual property (IP) owners face threats such as IP theft/piracy, tampering, counterfeiting, reverse engineering, and overproduction. Logic locking has emerged as a promising solution to protect integrated circuits (ICs) against supply chain vulnerabilities. It inserts key gates to corrupt circuit functionality for incorrect key inputs. A logic-locked chip test can be performed either before or after chip activation (becoming unlocked) by loading the unlocking key into the on-chip tamperproof memory. However, both pre-activation and post-activation tests suffer from lower test coverage, higher test cost, and critical security vulnerabilities. To address the shortcomings, we propose LL-ATPG, a logic-locking aware test method that applies a set of valet (dummy) keys based on a target test coverage to perform manufacturing test in an untrusted environment. LL-ATPG achieves high test coverage and minimizes test time overhead when testing the logic-locked chip before activation without sharing the unlocking key. We perform security analysis of LL-ATPG and experimentally demonstrate that sharing the valet keys with the untrusted foundry does not create additional vulnerability for the underlying locking method.