February 21, 2025
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’Chameleon circuits’ to be developed at Binghamton U., Lockheed look to thwart hackers

U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awards $1.4 million to Lockheed Martin’s Owego division and Watson School’s ECE department

At left, Professor Douglas H. Summerville, chair of the Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science’s ECE department, builds robots with students. Summerville will be the primary investigator for a project with Lockheed Martin to develop hacker-thwarting At left, Professor Douglas H. Summerville, chair of the Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science’s ECE department, builds robots with students. Summerville will be the primary investigator for a project with Lockheed Martin to develop hacker-thwarting
At left, Professor Douglas H. Summerville, chair of the Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science’s ECE department, builds robots with students. Summerville will be the primary investigator for a project with Lockheed Martin to develop hacker-thwarting "chameleon circuits." Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.
2 minute read

When considering the myriad ways that hackers can gain sensitive information, computer scientists used to focus their attention on software. Viruses, malware, keyloggers, denial-of-service attacks — all of these things were (and are) a programmer’s nightmare.

In recent years, though, new threats have emerged against hardware. With microchips not only in computers but in everything from cars and cell phones to nuclear plants and jet planes, researchers want to lock out anyone with bad intentions.

Earlier this spring, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded $1.4 million to a joint project from Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Owego division and Binghamton University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) for production of “chameleon circuits” to prevent chip hacking.

Professor Douglas H. Summerville, chair of the Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science’s ECE department, will serve as the primary investigator for the project, with Lockheed as the lead partner and contractor. The University’s share of the funding is approximately $540,000.

“No matter how securely you design something, no matter how much you trust it, when you get it down onto a silicon chip, the implementation often has things called ‘side channels’ that can be exploited,” he said. “There are weaknesses that can be exploited by someone to reverse-engineer a chip to change its behavior or tamper with it in some way.

“The idea of chameleon circuits is that we can covertly embed functionality into a circuit and make the circuit reactive to these kinds of attempts.”

Summerville — who has been at Binghamton since 1999 and ECE chair since 2015 — has researched this aspect of hardware security techniques for integrated circuit chips for the past decade.

Here’s how it works: Every chip has a certain capacity, but rarely if ever is all of that capacity utilized. Generally, that extra room is used for performance optimization.

The chameleon circuit, however, takes what designers often call the “don’t-care space” and embeds a hidden functionality that will react when hardware hackers strike. It could thwart any reverse engineering of the technology, or it could serve as a watermark to verify in the field that the chip has not been tampered with.

With most chips now manufactured outside of the United States, Summerville said, chameleon circuits could ensure they return to our shores as designed. The ultimate goal of this project with Lockheed is to create a working prototype system and integrate the technique with standard tools for making programmable logic devices.

“You could design a circuit, decide which part of it you want to protect, and then just click and go,” he said.

Among other expenses, the Air Force grant will fund three PhD students who will learn about designing secure systems while building and testing chameleon circuits.

“This is a fundamental problem we have now,” Summerville said. “We’re good at designing hardware, but we’re not good at designing secure hardware.”

Together with Lockheed, though, the Binghamton University research team will help to win more battles against the hackers.