Microchip fingerprints used to lock out chip pirates

"The public tends to overlook hardware piracy and focus instead on the well-known and oft-publicized problem of software piracy," Koushanfar said. "But some intellectual-property experts who have studied both estimate that the economic losses from hardware piracy is more severe compared to software piracy."

Hardware piracy has become increasingly problematic as the skyrocketing costs of microchip production have led chip-design companies to get out of the manufacturing business. When design and manufacturing are done by different companies, the design company's sole asset is the intellectual property (IP) associated with the integrated circuit's (IP) blueprints.

Hardware makers have tried a number of approaches to safeguard designers' IP, including stamping chips with watermarks, registering legitimate chips in databases and requiring the one-time use of an ID to unlock a chip's functionality. But safeguarding individual ICs – and not IPs – is the unique aspect and contribution of Koushanfar’s work.

Koushanfar said her original technology and her subsequent collaborative work stand apart from previously tried schemes because the ID generated in her scheme is derived directly from the chip itself, and without the ID, the chip will not function.

"The chip itself provides the key," she said. "There is no way to steal it because it doesn't exist until the chip is actually made, and once made, only the designer knows how to decipher the key."

For her original invention, Koushanfar has received the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award last year. Both the National Science Foundation and DARPA presently fund Koushanfar’s research. Koushanfar is also the director of the Texas Instruments DSP Leadership University program at Rice and has close industrial-level collaborations on her hardware security projects.