Trustworthy Hardware from Untrusted Components

Many factors combine to make hardware more susceptible to malicious alterations and less trustworthy, including increased use of third-party intellectual property components in system-on-chip designs, global scope of the chip-design process, increased design complexity and integration, and design teams with relatively few designers responsible for each subcomponent. There are unconfirmed reports of compromised hardware leading to undesirable economic consequences. A nontechnical solution is to design and manufacture hardware locally in a trusted facility with trusted personnel. The most common threats are from third-party vendors, as modern designs can contain a large number of distinct IP components, many of which may be sourced from small groups of designers.