Board-level authentication through I/O fingerprinter

Providing resistance against hardware attacks is important to ensure computing security. A board-level authentication mechanism can be used to detect tampers to the components of the circuit board. The proposed board-level authentication approach is to utilize the I/O timing characters to obtain a specified fingerprint for each specified component on the board, and to check the validity of the component by matching the fingerprint for later usage. Such fingerprint is extracted from the sampling results between the sampling pulses and the I/O pins data. The proposed approach can be easily built into common chips, because it doesn´t need complicated cryptographical logics and it also doesn´t need high speed sampling clock circuit. A FPGA based evaluation system is constructed and real 8051-MCU chips are tested. The tested result shows that it can effectively identifies the valid chip from the faked ones. Hence, the proposed approach can be deployed into the circuit board to protect the components equipped on the board against hardware attacks.