The Curious Case of Trusted IC Provisioning in Untrusted Testing Facilities

Asset provisioning is a crucial step in present-day IC manufacturing process. The nature of on-chip assets can range from crypto keys, IC configurations, and manufacturer firmware to target specific security specifications, policies, and chip debugging information. Given the criticality of the assets, a major part of IC security research is targeted towards the development of their protection mechanisms, especially in post-fabrication deployment phase. However, in this work our curious observation is that a series of novel attack surfaces can stem from asset provisioning at untrusted testing sites and colluding foundries which are not covered by existing threat models and defense schemes. To that end, we study the state-of-the-art protection mechanisms adopted for secure IC provisioning at untrusted testing facilities and highlight their security vulnerabilities. In particular, we show the inadequacy of existing authentication and design obfuscation-based defense mechanisms during asset provisioning through a secure root of trust.