Abstract
It is expected that as digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) mature, the hardware design flow will begin to resemble the current practice in the semiconductor industry: design teams send chip layouts to third-party foundries for fabrication. These foundries are untrusted and threaten to steal valuable intellectual property (IP). In a DMFB, the IP consists of not only hardware layouts but also of the biochemical assays (bioassays) that are intended to be executed on-chip. DMFB designers therefore must defend these protocols against theft. We propose to “lock” biochemical assays by inserting dummy mix-split operations. We experimentally evaluate the proposed locking mechanism, and show how a high level of protection can be achieved even on bioassays with low complexity. We also demonstrate a new class of attacks that exploit the side-channel information to launch sophisticated attacks on the locked bioassay.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 5 |
Journal | ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems |
Volume | 25 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2019 |
Keywords
- Bioassay
- Digital microfluidic biochip
- IP-theft
- Locking
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Science Applications
- Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering