A Secure and Low-overhead Active IC Metering Scheme

In the horizontal semiconductor business mode, the foundry can tamper or overbuild the integrated circuits (ICs) while the owner of the IC knows nothing about it. IC metering technique has been proposed to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a new external active IC metering method. The physical unclonable function (PUF) is used to generate a unique key for each chip. We first propose to modify the finite state machine (FSM) so that the PUF-based key can be securely retrieved from the FSM. With regards to overhead and security, this retrieval scheme takes advantage over the existing scheme with encryption module to safeguard the PUF-based key. The experimental results show that the proposed retrieval scheme incurs negligibly low overhead to the original FSM. Also, the overhead due to the metering method accounts for small percentage to the overall design while the proposed scheme can resist typical attacks.