Desieve the Attacker: Thwarting IP Theft in Sieve-Valve-based Biochips

Researchers develop bioassays following rigorous experimentation in the lab that involves considerable fiscal and highly-skilled-person-hour investment. Previous work shows that a bioassay implementation can be reverse engineered by using images or video and control signals of the biochip. Hence, techniques must be devised to protect the intellectual property (IP) rights of the bioassay developer. This study is the first step in this direction and it makes the following contributions: (1) it introduces use of a sieve-valve as a security primitive to obfuscate bioassay implementations; (2) it shows how sieve-valves can be used to obscure biochip building blocks such as multiplexers and mixers; (3) it presents design rules and security metrics to design and measure obfuscated biochips. We assess the cost-security trade-offs associated with this solution and demonstrate practical sieve-valve based obfuscation on real-life biochips.