February 27, 2014
The United States Department of Defense is asking engineers to develop a nearly microscopic-sized component that could be used to help identify and combat counterfeit or otherwise suspect electronic parts.
DARPA — the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — published a call for proposals this week that, if all goes as planned, could save the US military millions of dollars.
According to the agency, more than one million suspect electronic parts have been spotted in just the last two years, and seriously-flawed components could theoretically cause entire systems to crash.
“Counterfeit, or otherwise suspect electronic components, present a critical risk for the Department of Defense,” DARPA said in their call for proposals this week, “where a malfunction of a single part could lead to system failures that can put warfighter lives and missions at risk.”
To avoid any such complications, DARPA has launched a program that seeks to develop a tool — a tiny component, or “dielet” — that can verify the authenticity of a protected electronic component and ensure that it is trustworthy enough to be used.
“The dielet will be designed to be robust in operation, yet fragile in the face of tampering,” Kerry Bernstein, DARPA program manager, said in a statement this week. ”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.”
Very advanced, but also very affordable — the SHIELD program, Bernstein said, “demands a tool that costs less than a penny per unit, yet makes counterfeiting too expensive and technically difficult to do.”