DARPA SHIELD Program To Verify Faulty Military Counterfeit Electronics

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a device to detect used and counterfeit electronic components in order to counter problems leading to system failures that put soldiers’ lives and missions at risk.

The Supply Chain Hardware Integrity for Electronics Defense (SHIELD) program would counter the problem by developing a small (100 micron x 100 micron) component, or dielet, that will ”verify, without disrupting or harming the system, the trustworthiness of a protected electronic component.” Somehow, the unit is expected to cost less than a penny each.

According to reports, more than one million suspect parts have been found in the last two years alone. The agency is hoping to maximize the quality control.

“The dielet will be designed to be robust in operation, yet fragile in the face of tampering,” said Kerry Bernstein, DARPA program manager, in a statement. ”What SHIELD is seeking is a very advanced piece of hardware that will offer an on-demand authentication method never before available to the supply chain.”

SHIELD would safeguard against several problems: recycled components that are sold as new; unlicensed overproduction of authorized components; test rejects and sub-standard components sold as high-quality; parts marked with falsely elevated reliability or newer date of manufacture; low quality clones and copies; and components that are covertly repackaged for unauthorized applications, according to the report.

Although DARPA plans to offer more details in March, the report says that SHIELD will work by inserting the dielet into the component’s package at a manufacturing site, or affixing it to existing trusted components, without any alteration of the host component’s design.

The dielet would have no electrical connection to the host component. Instead, the component would be authenticated with a scan by a handheld probe which would upload serial numbers to a central server. The server then sends an unencrypted challenge to the dielet, which sends back an encrypted answer and data from passive sensors.

The pervasive problem of counterfeit components has been known for years. In 2011, the Senate Armed Services Committee, led by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., released the results of a months-long investigation, in which investigators found that for 100 counterfeit parts, 70 percent of them originated in China. Others were traced to the UK and Canada.

“The Department of Defense puts severe demands on electronics, which is why a trusted supply chain is so important,” said Bernstein. “SHIELD is a technology demonstration leveraging the asymmetry of scaling for security.”