Confounding Pirates and Trojan Horses: AI Gatekeepers at UF Provide Innovative Tool for Industries Looking To Shut Down Bad Actors

It’s been an issue with integrated circuits (IC) for a long time. While roughly 80 percent of the globe’s intellectual property (IP) is developed in the U.S, more than 80 percent of the chip fabrication is done in Asia, where compromised foundries can insert malware or may heist the embedded IP. End users in inhospitable nation-states can also reverse-engineer chips. And with supply chains languishing due to the pandemic, counterfeiters are rapidly capitalizing on the shortage of microchips by flooding the market with corrupted knockoffs.

“The financial cost of this problem is immense,” said Damon Woodard, Ph.D., director of the Florida Institute for National Security and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida (UF). “Intellectual property infringement accounts for multiple billion dollars each year. But more importantly, this is a national security threat. The prospect of a Trojan horse finding its way into some military equipment requires a solution that can verify chip security without the shadow of a doubt that what you’re expecting is what you’re getting.”

Dr. Woodard is leading a $1.2 million, three-year NSF research project to use artificial intelligence for the purpose of hardware security by developing an automated toolkit that will detect intellectual property and verify that the IC designs are exactly what they are supposed to be and not a piracy or sabotage. “In essence, we get the chip, take it apart, and let AI scan it to map the design, then we use the data gathered by the AI to verify whether what is supposed to be there is actually there,” Dr. Woodard explains.

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