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TRUST in Integrated Circuits (TRUST)
Program Manager: Dr. Carl McCants
At the present time, the United States does not have a comprehensive program to certify that the integrated circuits that are going into U.S. weapons systems do not contain malicious circuits. In response to these concerns, DARPA has initiated the TRUST in Integrated Circuits program to develop technologies that will ensure the trust of integrated circuits that are used in military systems but that are designed and fabricated under untrusted conditions.
The DARPA TRUST in Integrated Circuits program will not rely on procedures, but only trust techniques and testing technologies that can be measured. By basing the degree of trust assigned to an integrated circuit on measurable metrics, the DARPA program makes a radical departure from conventional approaches. Neither metrics for trust nor the testing methods to quantify trust has ever been done before in hardware design and fabrication of integrated circuits. The DARPA program is pursuing a metrics approach that is formulated in terms of probability of detection vs. probability of false alarms. This provides a clear path to identification of an integrated circuit that was maliciously attacked. However, DARPA departs from the traditional definition (where the Trojan Horse is the signal) to a more basic measurement where any change in the integrated circuit (e.g., transistor, wire, etc.) is considered the signal. This provides a good "change"
basis around which we can define metrics. (As opposed to the unmanageable case where we might be faced with a semi-infinite number of possible Trojan Horses.)
The DARPA TRUST in Integrated Circuits program consists of three one-year phases. The metrics for the program become more difficult in each phase, with the number of transistors examined increasing and the time allowed to perform the examination decreasing. At the same time, the required probability of detecting a change to the integrated circuit increases and the probability of declaring a good circuit as bad decreases.
The TRUST program technology development team is organized into three thrusts for ensuring trust in integrated circuits:
- Thrust 1 - Ensuring trust in the design cycle for application specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
- Thrust 2 - Ensuring trust when an ASIC is fabricated in an untrusted foundry.
- Thrust 3 - Ensuring trust when employing field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in military systems.