SOME MECHANISMS TOWARDS IMPROVING SECURITY OF MICROFLUIDIC BIOCHIPS

Abstract

Micro uidic biochip is an emerging class of lab-on-a-chip systems in the eld of safety critical applications in the world of healthcare, biological and biochemical rms. The main challenge in design automation of micro uidic biochips is to incorporate on-chip mixing and dilution of biochemical reagents and samples to achieve a desired concentration required for bioprotocols. The heuristic must be able to minimize sample, bu er, and wastage as much as possible in such a way that desired concentration factor is achieved by a minimum number of mix/split cycles. Micro uidic biochips are the miniaturized dynamic device utilized for medical diagnosis, bio- chemical analysis, and frequent diseases detection for which reason these devices are also known as biomedical microelectromechanical systems (bioMEMS). With the evolution of biochips, dif- ferent types of micro uidic biochips have been introduced till date. Continuous- ow Micro u- idic (CMF) biochip, Digital Micro uidic (DMF) biochips, Micro-Electrode-Dot-Array (MEDA) biochips, Programmable Micro uidic Device (PMD) and Paper-based (PB) biochips are some promising examples of micro uidics. In last decades, Digital micro uidic biochip industry has been improved due to its so many advantages in the eld of healthcare rms. As its popular- ity is increasing day-by-day, biochip business opportunities have grown exponentially in last two decades. The global biochip market is expected to gain $12.3 billion by 2025 from $5.7 billion in 2018. As a result, the chance of attacking biochips by malicious people to alter its operation and waste of more costly samples is increased day by day. Moreover, when a layout design is fabricated in a foundry that cannot be managed and controlled by the (fabless) design house, there may be malicious circuit alteration or insertion, reverse engineering, intellectual property (IP) piracy, tampering, miscalibration and these attacks lead to disastrous bioprotocol outcomes. On increasing more unreliable communication networks day-by-day, technological shifts in the elds of communication and security are now converging. In today's cyber threat landscape, these micro uidic biochips are ripe targets of powerful cyber-attacks from di erent hackers or cyber- criminals. Hence, security assurance and trustworthiness of biochips has become one paramount importance to focus for comprehensive research to achieve accurate results. Researchers need to search new directions that will provide security guarantees for biochips. For past few years, check- points and error recovery mechanisms have attracted researcher's attention. Unfortunately, such research works are not su cient to protect actuation sequence and layout of biochip from IP theft and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. Also, these works are incapable of handling more than one hardware Trojan (hT) insertion into chip. Hence, further research work is essential to meet the challenges of checkpoint minimization, hTs, MITM attack, and IP piracy to DMF biochips and nd out the respective actions which should be taken to o set the security vulnerabilities in biochip for its trustworthy before any attack jeopardizes the world of healthcare, biological and biochemical industries. This thesis rst provides a brief review of design automation research for di erent micro uidic biochips with their security issues over the last decade. In this review, a brief description is given for different architecture of biochips and the general topics of front-end as well as back-end research in design automation eld. Selected research results are then introduced, which also match the general trend of research topics from front-end to back-end. In this the- sis, given the bioprotocol operations schedule and placement information for multiplexed in-vitro diagnostics of human physiological uids, di erent security models are determined and proposed with their performance metrics. Moreover, the work can guide the checkpoints placement and timing of checkpoints so that the result of an attack is reduced, and hence enhance the security concerns, reliabilities, and trustworthiness of biochips. Simulation results articulate the efficacy of the proposed security models without the overhead of the bioprotocol completion time. Hope to develop a secure and reliable microfluidic biochip design flow for a sustainable biochip world to achieve better resistance to any attack.