BioChipWork: Reverse Engineering of Microfluidic Biochips

Microfluidic biochip is an emerging platform that has wide applications in areas of immunoassays, DNA sequencing and point-of-care health service. This paper presents BioChipWork, the first practical framework for automatic reverse engineering and IP piracy of microfluidic biochips. Our work targets two types of presently available microfluidic biochips which are characterized based on working mechanisms: flow-based microfluidic biochip (FMFB) and droplet-based microlfuidic biochip (DMFB). More specifically, BioChipWork identifies two practical sets of reverse engineering attacks and demonstrates the attacks using our developed algorithm and an open source synthesis tool. In the first attack, the attacker extracts the hardware layout of the pertinent FMFB based on image analysis. In the second attack, the attacker reconstructs the proprietary protocol mapped onto the DMFB by analyzing the actuation sequence or the video frames recorded by the CCD camera. The proposed reverse engineering attacks are non-intrusive, scalable and easy to implement, rendering the IP of authentic owners in danger. As countermeasures to obscure the functional layout and reduce information leakage from side-channels, we suggest novel biochip camouflaging and obfuscation techniques.