US universities get grants for semiconductor security research

Ten US universities are sharing $4m in new funding to develop ways to protect semiconductors from counterfeiting and other security threats.

The money - provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and university consortium Semiconductor Research Corp (SRC) - will be spent on nine projects aimed at developing  "circuit, architecture and system level" methods and tools to protect processors.

The projects cover a range of applications such as decreasing the likelihood of unintended behaviour or access, increasing resistance to tampering, and improving authentication throughout the supply chain and in the field.

Among the projects detailed in the Secure, Trustworthy, Assured and Resilient Semiconductors and Systems (STARSS) programme are a University of Minnesota project to develop hierarchical approaches for authentication and obfuscation of chips, as well as a Carnegie Mellon University project on secure chip odometers that can record the use and age of integrated circuits (ICs) and help detect counterfeits.

A full list of the projects is available here.