Hardware Root of Trust for SSN-basedDFT Ecosystems

Abstract

A hardware root of trust (RoT) is the foundation on which all secure operations of a circuit depend, including those related to DFT. Despite many countermeasures aimed at facing potential threats such as untrusted users accessing a test interface, IC vendors raise several concerns regarding the complexity of such solutions, both in terms of area overhead and the impact on the design flow. These concerns have motivated this work presenting a simple, yet effective, comprehensive and non-intrusive lightweight hardware root of trust to counteract scan-related security threats. It builds on and easily integrates with a Streaming Scan Network (SSN) technology and takes advantage of its inherent data scrambling and packetized test data distribution.