Inspiration
Our group specializes heavily in hardware and supply chain security. We are driven by potential dangers to and the need to protect the many important systems in America which are critically reliant on electronics. When seeing this competition, we felt that we had a lot to offer in terms of solutions to the counterfeit problem that is plaguing many sectors of online commerce.
What it does
This project acts as a method of tracking integrated circuits' path through the supply chain. It enables any distributor in the supply chain, along with the final customer, to see, verify, and update a chip's history. It also detects if the chip is a genuine, new product or if it is a cloned/recycled chip.
How we built it
For our prototype, we attached RFID tags with internal storage to different ICs, and then built an app in Swift which performs all of the signature generation and verification discussed in the project paper. This app was built to communicate with the RFIDs and update them properly.
Challenges we ran into
Both members on this team are of electrical and computer engineering backgrounds, so building the app was not something that we were very familiar with. Fortunately, we had some help from some colleagues in the computer science department to get it working properly.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The most significant accomplishment is the fact that this can be done at the distributor level without powering the chip. As a result, there is absolutely no advanced equipment needed and verification is fast and easy using the app.
What we learned
Throughout the project we learned a lot about different RFID tags and their benefits trying to get the best version of the prototype. We also learned and addressed many different attacks that had been presented to previous versions of this work.
What's next for A Robust Approach for Electronic Supply Chain Provenance
As mentioned in the last section of the project, the natural next step is to take this solution and advance it beyond just the electronics supply chain. Using RFID combined with physically unclonable functions to create device fingerprints, we think it should be possible to use this with other items as well.
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