Design-for-Trust Techniques for Digital Microfluidic Biochip Layout With Error Control Mechanism⋆*

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proc. of IEEE Region 10 Symposium (TENSYMP), 2019 [1].

Among recent technological advances, microfluidic biochips have been leading a prominent solution for healthcare and miniaturized bio-laboratories with the assurance of high sensitivity and reconfigurability. On increasing more unreliable communication networks day-by-day, technological shifts in the fields of communication and security are now converging. In today's cyber threat landscape, these microfluidic biochips are ripe targets of powerful cyber-attacks from different hackers or cyber-criminals. Hence, securing such systems is of paramount importance. This paper presents the security aspects of digital microfluidic biochip layout to protect the confidentiality of layout data from unscrupulous people and man-in-the-middle attacks. We propose an authentication mechanism with an error control mechanism that provides reliability, authentication, trustworthy and safety for both storage and communication of GDS, i.e., Graphical Design System, file generally used for digital microfluidic biochip layouts. Simulation results articulate the efficacy of the proposed security model without the overhead of the bioprotocol completion time. The proposed scheme, which used AES as an encryption algorithm with a 256-bit encryption key, has also shown a speedup of 6.0 (with 85% efficiency) faster than the prior efficient scheme. We hope to develop a secure layout design flow for biochips to achieve better resistance to any attack.