Introduction to Trustworthy Hardware - Spring 2013

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering - NYU Poly


Ramesh Karri -- rkarri AT poly DOT edu

Teaching Assisstant
Jeyavijayan (JV) Rajendran -- jrajen01 AT students DOT poly DOT edu

Course description
Motivation: Globalization has led to outsourcing of design, fabrication, test and packaging of ICs. Rogue elements in any of these phases can alter the design and embed malicious circuits. These malicious circuits may be triggered some time in the future. Classical VLSI design and test methods are inadequate to detect these malicious circuits. Even if there are no malicious circuits in designs, side channels of an implementation can leak the secrets and intellectual property. Examples include power, timing, EM radiation and deliberately introduced faults. Finally, the testing infrastructure used to improve the quality of ICs can be used to leak secrets.

Objective: In this course, students will be introduced to all these aspects of a VLSI design. In addition, the students will be exposed to defenses that can detect and protect against the variety of discussed threats.


Course contents
  • Ciphers: Block (AES/DES), stream, (Trivium) public key ciphers (RSA. ECC), hash functions (SHA-1)
  • Physically unclonable functions: design principles and applications
  • Side channels: overview and types. Fault attacks and countermeasures
  • Testing side channel: attacks and countermeasures
  • Hardware Trojans: overview, attacks and defenses
  • IP Piracy: logic encryption technique


    • Course requirements
  • EL5473 Introduction to CMOS VLSI design (or)
  • EL5493 Advanced Hardware Design (VHDL)


    • Labs
  • Implement a stream cipher/Homework on various ciphers
  • Design and Evaluating PUFs on an FPGA
  • Design a fault attack and evaluate a countermeasure
  • Scan attack on FPGA implementation of DES (insert scan chains and extract secret from a register in the scan chain)
  • Malicious 8051 processor design
  • Identify a good design from a bad design
  • Decipher the secret keys used for logic encryption of combinational logic
    • Related searches:
    design hardware course testing stream
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