810
8 Modern Weapons: Possibilities and Limitations
In this multimillion-dollar cost of development of modern microcircuits, from 25 to
75% (according to expert estimates presented by specialists) are spent on ensuring the
safety of microcircuits. This huge variation in the percentage cost of works depends
on the specific requirements of the end customer, on the functional complexity of
the examined circuit, on its purpose, production technology, etc. With an increase
in the degree of integration and a decrease in the level of design standards used,
technical problems associated with the use of side-channel analytical methods, the
TESR method, analysis based on thermal radiation, heat generation, etc., sharply
increase. Design and development of new methods to identify and counter Trojans
require high financial costs and equally high qualifications of Trojan hunters.
Clearly, the corresponding analytical equipment costs not less than dozens of
millions of dollars.
If the researched microcircuit is designed for operation as part of critical, strategic,
and military electronic systems (nuclear industry, space surveillance, precisionguided munitions, submarines, etc.) in order for the customer to ensure the required
high level of security, instead of one or two tests it is necessary to perform the
maximum cycle of tests using all state-of-the-art methods of analysis that are not
always openly published and expensive equipment.
A serious law is in action here: “if you come into a security control center with
an order to test safety of your microcircuits, you need to understand that it will cost
you a lot of money.” This is the explanation of a well-known motto: “Safety is never
free”.
But if you think that such safety tests are applied only to military microcircuits
that make up only 3–4% of the total annual volume of international sales, you are
utterly wrong: these procedures today are used to test commercial and industrial
microcircuits for credit and bank cards, identification systems, or sometimes even
microcircuits for mass-market gaming consoles.
Today, this control is absolutely necessary if you don’t have a trusted foundry.
Therefore, the US Department of Defence created Joint Federated Assurance
Center (JFAC) to provide this service to everyone interested. Long-term goal of
the JFAC consists in analyzing security of modern microcircuits and increasing the
segment of the American microcircuits in the international market (Fig. 8.13).
Figure 8.14 shows the general structure of this center for ensuring reliability of
microcircuits. The center includes three main functional units. The first is the unit for
checking the correctness of the standard design route of the microcircuits: it should
be noted that this implies verification of all the previous documentations of the design
center responsible for development of a specific microcircuit by independent experts.
The second unit performs functional control of overseas foundries that have not
been certified by the US Department of Defense yet (untrusted foundries). The
specialists of this unit mostly perform the so-called destructive analysis (see Chap. 8
of the encyclopedia), including detailed examination of even the boards of electronic
components of military systems, in which the customer uses this particular analyzed
microcircuit. Even though the microcircuit itself can be safe (contain no embedded
Trojans), the board can contain additional elements introduced by the intruder, which
reduces the general level of safety of this electronic unit.
8 Modern Weapons: Possibilities and Limitations
In this multimillion-dollar cost of development of modern microcircuits, from 25 to
75% (according to expert estimates presented by specialists) are spent on ensuring the
safety of microcircuits. This huge variation in the percentage cost of works depends
on the specific requirements of the end customer, on the functional complexity of
the examined circuit, on its purpose, production technology, etc. With an increase
in the degree of integration and a decrease in the level of design standards used,
technical problems associated with the use of side-channel analytical methods, the
TESR method, analysis based on thermal radiation, heat generation, etc., sharply
increase. Design and development of new methods to identify and counter Trojans
require high financial costs and equally high qualifications of Trojan hunters.
Clearly, the corresponding analytical equipment costs not less than dozens of
millions of dollars.
If the researched microcircuit is designed for operation as part of critical, strategic,
and military electronic systems (nuclear industry, space surveillance, precisionguided munitions, submarines, etc.) in order for the customer to ensure the required
high level of security, instead of one or two tests it is necessary to perform the
maximum cycle of tests using all state-of-the-art methods of analysis that are not
always openly published and expensive equipment.
A serious law is in action here: “if you come into a security control center with
an order to test safety of your microcircuits, you need to understand that it will cost
you a lot of money.” This is the explanation of a well-known motto: “Safety is never
free”.
But if you think that such safety tests are applied only to military microcircuits
that make up only 3–4% of the total annual volume of international sales, you are
utterly wrong: these procedures today are used to test commercial and industrial
microcircuits for credit and bank cards, identification systems, or sometimes even
microcircuits for mass-market gaming consoles.
Today, this control is absolutely necessary if you don’t have a trusted foundry.
Therefore, the US Department of Defence created Joint Federated Assurance
Center (JFAC) to provide this service to everyone interested. Long-term goal of
the JFAC consists in analyzing security of modern microcircuits and increasing the
segment of the American microcircuits in the international market (Fig. 8.13).
Figure 8.14 shows the general structure of this center for ensuring reliability of
microcircuits. The center includes three main functional units. The first is the unit for
checking the correctness of the standard design route of the microcircuits: it should
be noted that this implies verification of all the previous documentations of the design
center responsible for development of a specific microcircuit by independent experts.
The second unit performs functional control of overseas foundries that have not
been certified by the US Department of Defense yet (untrusted foundries). The
specialists of this unit mostly perform the so-called destructive analysis (see Chap. 8
of the encyclopedia), including detailed examination of even the boards of electronic
components of military systems, in which the customer uses this particular analyzed
microcircuit. Even though the microcircuit itself can be safe (contain no embedded
Trojans), the board can contain additional elements introduced by the intruder, which
reduces the general level of safety of this electronic unit.