CEO of Valbonne headquartered tech startup, Texplained, explains how her company’s hardware solution can protect chips from counterfeiters.
In a new article by eeNews Europe, Texplained’s CEO Clarisse Ginet describes how her startup, founded in 2013, is “on a mission to render chip-level reverse engineering a dead-end for IC counterfeiters”. She also argues that the industry should not be complacent about laboratory-grade attacks on chips as they are no longer a minor threat but pose a severe risk.
As Ginet explains, “It used to be the case, maybe 15 years ago, that invasive attacks (chemically and physically removing layers to read through a chip’s architecture) were too technical and too costly to be a threat, but this is no longer the case today,” going on to add, “Just imagine, we are a small startup and yet we were able to fund our own lab and break into most commercial chips available today.”
While there are a number of protective measures available to help counter non-invasive attacks, including Rambus’s obfuscation IP, Ginet warns that counterfeiters these days are more likely to opt for an invasive attack which allows them to access the chip’s “internals together with its embedded code”.
As Ginet describes, “[But] once a chip has been opened up and analysed thoroughly, it is easier to guide non-invasive attacks to extract its code or to communicate with it through its standard or custom protocol. If you look at the multibillion dollar opportunities in counterfeiting payTV smart cards or producing off-branded printer cartridges and other computer peripherals, these are markets that have been broken through invasive attacks, because they offer a 100% yield.”
Despite these hefty incentives to counterfeiters, currently Common Criteria Certification schemes fail to consider invasive attacks a real threat, a decision which Ginet feels is tantamount to “a denial of reality”, as eeNews Europe reports.
In response to the threat, Texplained has come up with and patented a “unique hardware IP solution” designed to stop “all attempts at leaking out the embedded code, even when the chip has been fully analysed and understood.
“Instead of adding costly shielding metal layers or trying to obfuscate a chip design, which can always be reverse-engineered anyway, we only introduce a few standard cells within the circuit to detect any attempt at extracting the code,” Ginet explains.
Named the NVM Defender, Texplained’s solution works by detecting “any significant difference” and triggering a Defence Module that can “stop all executions”, or even kill the actual chip.
According to Ginet, this new IP is “minimally invasive” and “renders invasive attacks useless because you can’t bypass the countermeasures, hence over with counterfeiting, cloning or code emulation on other chips.”
Texplained charges “an upfront fee” for their NVM Defender, in addition to demanding royalties for chips produced.
Self-funded Texplained, which launched its website and online store earlier this year, and also offers other services including full chip analysis, is predicting to rake in millions of euros in revenue over the next three to five years.