Trimming The Fat: A Minimum-Security Architecture for Protecting SoC Designs Against Supply Chain Threats

Supply chain security is an interesting facet of modern System-on-chip security. While other attacks (control flow, information flow, side-channel, etc.) may be of interest in specific application domains, supply chain confidentiality attacks are almost always possible in virtually every SoC. These attacks include device counterfeiting, overproduction, reverse engineering, illegal recycling, etc. Because supply-chain is a blanket attack space, a security architecture that provides assurance against it is an open research topic. Minimum security threats include protection against counterfeiting, reverse engineering, and illegal recycling across all lifecycles of the device. In this paper, we present SOCRATES, a minimum security architecture that provides security against such attacks. SOCRATES is a viable candidate, especially for low-power and area designs.