EM Fingerprints: Towards Identifying Unauthorized Hardware Substitutions in the Supply Chain Jungle

This paper proposes a system capable of branding digital device components based on the EM signals typically emitted during their normal operational cycles. Such signals contain digital artifacts that are unique, which may act as an identifier of a particular device component e.g., its CPU, or the entire device if one chooses to take into account a combination of multiple such components. In real-life scenarios, this “bio-metrical” fingerprinting of hardware has to be conducted only once, possibly as part of an initial device configuration process with minimum additional maintenance time and cost, by the network administrators. At a subsequent stage, devices can get “authenticated” by comparing their newly emitted signals against the preexisting database during routine checks. The experimental results attest that the proposed approach can effectively protect a network against unrecognized potentially rogue devices posing as benign or malicious substitutions of hardware components at the chip level with near-perfect accuracy. One may view the proposed system as a technical solution to verify the trustworthiness of digital parts as well as the actors involved in certain stages of the supply chain.