NAND flash can verify a device's identity

IDG News Service - People who make, buy and sell flash storage could detect counterfeit products based on the unique "fingerprints" of the chips, using techniques being developed by university researchers.

Scholars at the University of California at San Diego and Cornell University have developed software to test variations in flash behavior that are unique to each chip, said Steven Swanson, an associate professor at UCSD and director of UCSD's Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory. By running the same test in the factory and then further up the supply chain, for example, a company could compare the results to verify that a flash chip was authentic, he said.

One industry observer believes this could be a useful tool.

"There's a lot of counterfeit in the [supply] chain," said analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technology Associates. It can be hard to detect, because the chain is not always as simple as a device maker contracting with one flash manufacturer to supply the chips for an entire production run of consumer devices, he said. System vendors need to fill unexpected surges in demand, so they often buy small lots of chips on the open market.

There are many third parties that buy and sell these chips, Kay said. "This is one of the biggest things they do, is verify parts, and it's a pain," Kay said.

UCSD's Swanson discussed his team's work at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, this week.

Swanson proposed another possible use of the technology: to prevent counterfeiting of devices such as cellphones and tablets that contain flash. It could also be used by governments to determine whether spies had swapped an official's phone with a seemingly identical one that is bugged, he said.

Testing flash silicon as a proxy for an entire device provides an authentication technique that doesn't require any hardware changes, Swanson said. It only requires firmware and an infrastructure for testing devices at key points in the supply chain, he said.

"I think if someone wanted to do this, they could do it now," Swanson said. The technology could be licensed to manufacturers, who would create a database of results for each of the chips that ships out of the factory. No manufacturers have approached Swanson's team yet, he said. The research was first presented last month.

The system uses "physically unclonable functions" (PUFs), or variations in manufacturing that are unique to each element of each flash chip. Swanson described one PUF that his team has worked with, called Program Disturb. It uses a type of manufacturing flaw that doesn't affect normal operation but causes problems under test conditions.