Balancing testability and security by configurable partial scan design

Scan chain design facilitates chip testing by providing an interface for the test engineers to access and control the internal states of the circuit. This feature has also been exploited to break systems such as the cryptographic chips by the attack known as scan chain side channel analysis. From the perspective of information access, test engineers and scan chain attackers have the same goal-observe and control the scan chain side channel information. Consequently, all the existing countermeasures have to make the tradeoff between scan chain security and the testability it can provide. In this paper, we propose a novel public-private partial scan chain design which can deliver both full testability and security. The key idea is to partition the flip flops into a public partial chain and a set of parallel private partial chains. The private partial chains are protected by means of a hardware implemented finite state machine and an obfuscation mechanism based on configurable physical unclonable function. We demonstrate how full testability can be achieved by the proposed public-private partial chains. We conduct security and performance analysis to show that our approach is robust against all the known scan chain based attacks and can improve testing time and power consumption with negligible hardware overhead.