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In today's global market, the competition is fierce. This makes first-to-market revenue gains key to fund R&D of new products which takes months, if not years and millions of dollars of investments into the next generation products. With more manufacturing, assembly, and testing now moving global and outside of a company's facility to be done at contract manufacturers; security of the critical design and information has become a top priority. According to the International Anti-counterfeiting Bureau, US companies lost more than $200 billion in revenue in 2005 due to theft.
Traditional reverse-engineering used to be the most common security breach. This refers to the practice whereby systems are torn apart and design techniques are extracted to reduce the perpetrators R&D cost and time-to-market. Today, designers have new threats to the security of products that include cloning and overbuilding.
Cloning is simply the direct copying of a design, IP, or software, normally with no feature improvement and even with no time spent determining the design technique. With minimal investment, this can provide the Cloners with fast time-to-market and often direct replacement of the cloned product in the established customer base of the initial product. This ultimately allows the Cloners to reap greater profits and offer lower cost products than the OEM. The result can be to greatly reduce the original company's market potential leaving them with reduced product revenue. The revenue lost to Cloners is a permanent loss and is unrecoverable to the initial company.
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Overbuilding occurs when a contract manufacturer or assembly house builds extra product and sells it without the knowledge or authorization of the designing company. Overbuilding offers an even faster time-to-market than cloning. In fact, overbuilt products have even been known to hit the market prior to the original product!
With no engineering investment or development cost, Overbuilders receive the best profits and can offer the lowest product price. Overbuilding can result in much more than just revenue and market share loss. First, the original company has no idea how much "real" product is in the field. This makes the support burden difficult to manage and potentially much higher than they can manage. Secondly, if a company does not know if a product in the field is real or an exact duplicate, not only the support costs can get out of hand but several other factors come into play such as maintaining the product price in the market.
Additionally, there's no way to guarantee the same level of quality. This can significantly impact the bottom line with RMAs that need to be validated and processed. Another area that becomes a burden is product reliability. With both overbuilding and cloning, it opens an enormous liability and responsibility on the company to weed out those products. If a company cannot control and weed out the "fake" units, their company name, reputation and corporate image can be at stake, which can be significant in determining future sales and the company's longevity.
Unique Device DNA
FPGA bit-stream protection can be effective against reverse engineering and even some cloning, but it leaves a potential gap when it comes to overbuilding. In order to protect designs from reverse engineering, cloning, and overbuilding there is the new "Device DNA" feature available only in members of the new Spartan-3A family from Xilinx.
The Spartan-3A is the first low cost FPGA that addresses and increases the level of security at a design level. This security solution is far more robust and flexible than the older technology of bit-stream encryption. Bit-stream encryption does not stop a competitor or a thief from copying the information in the device and making multiple copies (cloned or overbuilt) which can then be sold. One of the downsides to encryption is that the key is kept somewhere on the device. With device diagnostic techniques, the security can be broken or key can be found and defeated. Once the device security has been defeated all other products using that device are vulnerable.
The Device DNA design-level security used in members of the Spartan-3A family has many facets to improve the level of security across the whole design. This security protection can be used for many pieces of the design such as critical data, IP, embedded code, or the complete design. The authentication algorithm is user-defined and implemented as part of the design for maximum flexibility; it allows the designer to choose the type of authentication algorithm, the level of security and the amount of logic used for security. This flexibility not only allows the designer to change the security algorithm from model to model or generation to generation, but also during field upgrades, increasing the overall security and reducing the ability to reverse engineer the algorithm.
The basic concept of Spartan-3A design level security can be compared to when you access an Automated Teller Machine (ATM); you insert your bank card (the Device DNA) and authenticate your identity by entering a Personal Identification Number (Authorization Algorithm). If someone steals your ATM card, they cannot use it without also having your PIN number. The system then compares your information entered with the previously stored information on the bank's computer (the stored authorization code). If they match, then the ATM will work; otherwise, nothing works. This is the same process that can be used with the Spartan-3A security.
The weakness with ATM security is that if someone gains access to both your ATM card and your PIN number you can "kiss your cash goodbye." The PIN Authorization algorithm number, once learned, is easily cloned. This is why the authorization algorithm is incorporated into the design itself. The algorithm is placed in the most secret location inside of programmable logic with millions of configuration options.
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