Detecting Counterfeit ICs with Blockchain-based Verification Framework

Abstract

Counterfeit electronic parts have posed a serious threat to consumers, industry, and government and military agencies for a long time. They not only lead to massive damage in terms of financial and reputation losses, but can also create high risk in the compromise of system safety and integrity. Our previous work shows the possibility of achieving the decentralized runtime verification by incorporating some mechanisms of the blockchain technology into a distributed system for locating the accountability when error occurs. In this paper, we propose to develop a verification framework based on blockchain technology to detect the abnormalities of counterfeit ICs at every stage of their lifecycles, including after being deployed into the system. We design an efficient and effective method that can store the inspection and testing results into a blockchain, and apply the smart marker scheme which can merge separate blockchains associated with individual ICs into one blockchain after the ICs are installed onto the same system.