The small sized, low energy consuming chip is equipped with advanced encryption techniques to prevent information leakage from a smart device.

In this age of increased digitalisation where several electronic devices seem to be connected to the internet for faster processing and storage of critical data, the chances of cyberattacks on them through a side-channel attack for malicious purposes is a grave concern. A side-channel attack seeks to gather secret information by indirectly exploiting a system or its hardware. A savvy hacker could monitor fluctuations in the device’s power consumption while the neural network is operating to extract protected information that “leaks” out of the device. Existing methods to prevent side-channel attacks consume a lot of power, making them unfeasible for low-powered IoT devices like smartwatches. [1]

Figure 1. Integrated Chip that Secures your Personal Data from Hackers

Figure 1 shows the chip the team developed is based on a special type of computation known as threshold computing. Rather than having a neural network operate on actual data, the data are first split into unique, random components. The network operates on those random components individually, in a random order, before accumulating the final result.

Using this method, the information leakage from the device is random every time, so it does not reveal any actual side-channel information, Maji says. But this approach is more computationally expensive since the neural network now must run more operations, and it also requires more memory to store the jumbled information. [2]

Security matters

While providing significant security against power side-channel attacks, the researchers’ chip requires 5.5 times more power and 1.6 times more silicon area than a baseline insecure implementation.

“We’re at the point where security matters. We have to be willing to trade off some amount of energy consumption to make a more secure computation. This is not a free lunch. Future research could focus on how to reduce the amount of overhead in order to make this computation more secure,” Chandrakasan says.

They compared their chip to a default implementation which had no security hardware. In the default implementation, they were able to recover hidden information after collecting about 1,000 power waveforms (representations of power usage over time) from the device. With the new hardware, even after collecting 2 million waveforms, they still could not recover the data.

They also tested their chip with biomedical signal data to ensure it would work in a real-world implementation. The chip is flexible and can be programmed to any signal a user wants to analyze, Maji explains. [3]

References:

1. https://www.electronicsforu.com/news/whats-new/integrated-chip-secures-personal-data-hackers
2. https://scitechdaily.com/new-chip-can-prevent-hackers-from-extracting-hidden-information-from-smart-devices/
3. https://news.mit.edu/2022/application-specific-integrated-circuit-iot-chip-0218

Cite this article:

Thanusri swetha J (2022), Integrated Chip that Secures your Personal Data from Hackers, Anatechmaz, pp. 179