EAGER: Collaborative: IC Supply Chain Security and Quality Control in Business and Social Context

Trusted hardware is essential to achieving a secure and trustworthy cyberspace. However, this security foundation is not free of threats. Specifically, an adversary involved in Integrated Circuit (IC) development and supply may launch a number of attacks such as intellectual property theft, design tamper, counterfeiting and overproduction. The Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative has identified this supply chain risk management problem as a top national priority. Addressing this requires understanding the incentives and capabilities, both business and technical, of parties in this chain. This project combines expertise from computer security, business, and industrial engineering to develop risk assessment techniques, management mechanisms, and IC design techniques that are security and supply-chain aware. Findings from this research will lead to improved trust and closer cooperation among various parties in industry ecosystems.

This inter-disciplinary multi-university collaborative project develops new methodologies for IC development and supply chain security risk mitigation and quality control by leveraging the existing management science techniques in product development, supply chain and project management. Specifically, the investigators (1) assess potential hidden incentive and profitability structures based on principal-agent models in game theory, (2) develop security risk-aware IC design and management techniques, and (3) integrate economics and management science techniques such as (i) revelation principle and other incentive contracts, (ii) various effort, revenue and cost sharing mechanisms with new security-enhancing IC design and manufacturing methodologies (iii) design data access control, (iv) mutual verification and (v) digital forensics techniques.