Press release

OneSpin Hardware Trust and Security Challenge Garners Industry-Wide Attention and Names Three Winners

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Sponsored by Businesswire

OneSpin® Solutions, provider of certified IC integrity verification solutions for building functionally correct, safe, secure and trusted integrated circuits, today announced the three winners of its fourth annual holiday puzzle, held to highlight real-world problems of trust vulnerabilities in hardware designs and illuminate ways to avoid them. Participants from more than 40 organizations, including Xilinx, Intel, Fotonation, NXP, Nokia, AMD, Sensirion, and the OpenHW Group, worked to try to detect hardware Trojans inserted into two RTL designs.

Winners Nithin Kumar Guggilla of Xilinx, Tero Kuusijärvi of NOKIA, and Wayne Yun of AMD found the Trojans in two RTL designs sourced from TrustHub and contributed their ideas and opinions. They receive Bose SoundSport wireless headphones.

Hardware Trust and Security Dilemma

The nature of today’s complex electronics makes them extremely vulnerable to unintended or malicious attacks. A hardware Trojan is engineered to cause major damage in response to a trigger known by the attacker. It could expose “secure” data, cause serious product malfunction, or even destroy a chip. Modern, highly configurable hardware provides a favorable hiding place for backdoors, time bombs, performance degradation or kill switches. And the threat of Trojans being inserted into third-party IPs or during pre-silicon design implementation steps is of increasing concern to the hardware community. Everything from connected autonomous vehicles, medical devices, smartphones, defense and aerospace systems, nuclear power plants, 5G networks, IoT devices, and cloud computing are at risk.

Companies have an obligation to ensure that these electronics are protected against attacks that could compromise safety and security. The OneSpin Hardware Trust and Security challenge illustrates how vulnerable designs are to Trojans that can hide throughout all the stages of IC development and how to combat them.

“This challenge has confirmed that more and more companies now understand the importance of protecting their hardware designs against trust and security risks,” commented Raik Brinkmann, President and CEO of OneSpin. “Leaving vulnerabilities in the design, whether unintentional or malicious, can have catastrophic consequences. Being able to exhaustively detect these ‘holes’ in the design is critical to delivering safe, trusted, and secure devices to the market. OneSpin is at the forefront of providing the technology assuring trust and security at the hardware level, as part of IC integrity.”

About the Hardware Trust and Security Puzzle

The puzzle required participants to find Trojans in two RTL designs sourced from TrustHub and were allowed to use any tool available to them to reach a solution. Guidance was provided to them on how OneSpin solutions would allow the Trojans to be found in less than three minutes. Participants were required to submit waveforms of the traces that activate these Trojans. This challenge has delivered an increased awareness of the vulnerability risks associated with Trojans and suggests a path to automatic detection of these types of IC supply chain attacks.

You can read about the winners’ entries in OneSpin’s March blog post at: https://www.onespin.com/resources/blog/details/keep-the-wooden-horse-out-of-your-chip

About OneSpin Solutions

OneSpin Solutions is a leading provider of certified IC integrity verification solutions for building functionally correct, safe, secure and trusted integrated circuits. These solutions are based on OneSpin’s widely used formal verification technology and assure the integrity of SoCs, ASICs and FPGAs. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, OneSpin partners with leaders worldwide in automotive and industrial applications; defense; avionics; artificial intelligence and machine learning; consumer electronics; and communications. Its advanced solutions are well-suited for developing heterogeneous computing platforms, using programmable logic, and designing and integrating processor cores, such as RISC-V. OneSpin’s customer-oriented commitment is fundamental to its growth and success. OneSpin: Assuring IC Integrity. Visit www.OneSpin.com to learn more.

OneSpin, OneSpin Solutions and the OneSpin logo are trademarks of OneSpin Solutions GmbH. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.