A rampant piracy market flourishes in China and other countries where intellectual property law enforcement is not up to U.S. standards.  This piracy is not limited merely to bootleg CDs or DVDs.  Entire processors, circuit boards, and consumer electronic products are produced in pirate plants.  These plants are typically based either on stolen blueprints of the device itself or blueprints of the actual production plant. 

Pirates have an easy time obtaining such plans, due to the abundant outsourcing that moved much of the international consumer electronics infrastructure to nations like China which provide cheap skilled labor, but are piracy prone.  Attempts by the Chinese government to stop such thefts or shut down pirate plants are mostly token gestures, as they do little to dent the overall rate of piracy.

Now researchers at the University of Michigan and Rice University's Computer Engineering schools seek to provide a potential solution to the problem.  The system is based on a lock-key premise. The patent holder would generate keys and the physical chips would have to contact the patent holder when turned on to verify authenticity and receive a key.  The chips will not operate if a proper key is not obtained.

The project is code named EPIC, short for Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuit, and utilizes complex cryptography.  It utilizes small changes to the chip on the hardware level, but these changes have virtually no effect on performance or power consumption.   Michigan computer engineering doctoral student Jarrod Roy is presenting the research at the Design Automation and Test in Europe conference in Germany on March 13.  Igor Markov, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at U-M and a co-author of the paper says the new technology solves a very new problem -- piracy due to outsourcing.

Markov explains the crisis for chipmakers, stating, "Pirated chips are sometimes being sold for pennies, but they are exactly the same as normal chips.  They were designed in the United States and usually manufactured overseas, where intellectual property law is more lax. Someone copies the blueprints or manufactures the chips without authorization."

Fabrication plants typically cost around $3B USD to $4B USD according to the study's authors.  Farinaz Koushanfar, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and a co-author on the paper, states, "Therefore, a growing number of semiconductor companies, including Texas Instruments and Freescale (a former division of Motorola), has recently announced that they would cease manufacturing chips with finer features, and outsource production to East Asia. However, even in U.S. facilities, working chips are sometimes reported defective by individual employees and later sold in gray markets."

Chips using the system would include hardware to produce a random 64-bit identification number.  The chip could not be unlocked without this identification number.  The patent holder could then activate legitimate chips, protecting against pirated designs.  This activation can be done over a phone line or internet connection.  Says Roy, "All chips are produced from the same blueprint, but differentiate themselves when they are turned on for the first time and generate their ID.  Nothing is known about this number before activation."

The activation would begin with the chip designating its random ID.  Based on this, the patent holder would send out a unique code to unlock the chip.  Since activations keys are generated on the fly, it would not be possible to steal a single key and use it on multiple chips, as each key is real-time generated and unique.

Markov says that the technology, if adopted by consumer electronics manufacturers, will make piracy very difficult.  Says Markov, "If someone was really bent on forging and had a hundred million dollars to spend, they could reverse-engineer the entire chip by taking it apart. But the point of piracy is to avoid such costs.  The goal of a practical system like ours is not to make something impossible, but to ensure that buying a license and producing the chip legally is cheaper than forgery."