PDNPulse: Sensing PCB Anomaly with the Intrinsic Power Delivery Network

The ubiquitous presence of printed circuit boards (PCBs) in modern electronic systems and embedded devices makes their integrity a top security concern. To take advantage the economies scale, today’s PCB design manufacturing are often performed by suppliers around globe, exposing them to many vulnerabilities along segmented supply chain. Moreover, increasing complexity designs also leaves ample room for numerous sneaky board-level attacks be implemented throughout each stage PCB’s lifetime, threatening devices. In this paper, we propose PDNPulse , power delivery network (PDN) based anomaly detection framework that can identify wide spectrum malicious modifications. PDNPulse leverages fact PDN’s characteristics inevitably affected modifications PCB. By detecting changes PDN impedance profile against golden model using Frechet distance-based algorithms, robustly successfully discern across system. Using PDNPulse, conduct extensive experiments on seven commercial-off-the-shelf PCBs, covering different scales, threat models, types. results confirm creates an effective asymmetry between attack defense.