Checkpoints Assignment on Cyber-Physical Digital Microfluidic Biochips for Early Detection of Hardware Trojans

Abstract

Present security study involving analysis of manipulation of individual droplets of samples and reagents by digital microfluidic biochip has remarked that the biochip design flow is vulnerable to piracy attacks, hardware Trojans attacks, overproduction, Denial-of-Service attacks, and counterfeiting. Attackers can introduce bioprotocol manipulation attacks against biochips used for medical diagnosis, biochemical analysis, and frequent diseases detection in healthcare industry. Among these attacks, hardware Trojans have created a major threatening issue in its security concern with multiple ways to crack the sensitive data or alter original functionality by doing malicious operations in biochips. In this paper, we present a systematic algorithm for the assignment of checkpoints required for error-recovery of available bioprotocols in case of hardware Trojans attacks in performing operations by biochip. Moreover, it can guide the placement and timing of checkpoints so that the result of an attack is reduced, and hence enhance the security concerns of digital microfluidic biochips. Comparative study with traditional checkpoint schemes demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm without overhead of the bioprotocol completion time with higher error detection accuracy.