As chips become increasingly integrated into critical systems—from healthcare devices and financial infrastructure to military equipment and autonomous vehicles—ensuring their security has become a top priority. Chips are vulnerable to a wide range of threats, including hardware Trojans, side-channel attacks, and counterfeiting, which can compromise data integrity, privacy, and system functionality.

Hardware Trojans are malicious modifications to a chip’s design or manufacturing process that can enable unauthorized access, data exfiltration, or system failure. These Trojans are often inserted during the design phase (e.g., by rogue engineers) or the manufacturing phase (e.g., by untrusted foundries), making them difficult to detect. To mitigate this risk, chip designers are adopting secure design practices, such as formal verification, which uses mathematical methods to prove the correctness of the chip’s design and detect hidden vulnerabilities. Additionally, techniques like split manufacturing—where different parts of the chip are fabricated by different trusted foundries—can prevent a single entity from inserting a Trojan.

Side-channel attacks exploit unintended physical emissions (e.g., power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, timing variations) from a chip to extract sensitive information, such as encryption keys. For example, a power analysis attack measures the chip’s power usage during cryptographic operations to infer the key. To defend against side-channel attacks, chip designers implement countermeasures such as power masking (varying power consumption to hide sensitive operations), electromagnetic shielding (reducing radiation leakage), and randomization (adding noise to timing or power signals).

Counterfeiting is another major security concern, as fake chips often fail to meet performance and reliability standards, leading to system malfunctions and safety risks. Counterfeit chips are typically sold at lower prices, making them attractive to cost-sensitive industries. To combat counterfeiting, manufacturers use anti-counterfeiting technologies, such as unique identification (ID) chips, holographic labels, and blockchain-based traceability systems, which enable end-users to verify the authenticity of a chip throughout its lifecycle.