Category: Industry Standards and Forums

Since its inception, ScanWorks has provided board-level shorts and opens testing of interconnects between Boundary-Scan devices through use of its Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) feature. ScanWorks ATPG creates the patterns necessary for shorts and opens testing based on the board topology (i.e. connections between devices) and the Boundary-Scan Cell types on the I/O pins within each device. With recent enhancements, ScanWorks can now generate patterns that can be applied by chip-level automatic test equipment (ATE) to test for shorts and opens in the interconnections between silicon โ€œchipletsโ€ in multi-die devices.
Today, February 15th, 2020, marks the official 30th Anniversary of JTAG. What a wild ride it has been โ€“ from its humble beginnings for detecting short and open circuits, it has evolved to be, in some ways, the most powerful and feared technology on the planet. How did we get here?
This past week, I attended the AUTOTESTCON 2019 conference, the premiere Defense Automated Test Equipment show, that has the theme of โ€œincreased mission effectiveness through advanced test and support technologyโ€. As you may have seen, I was honored with the โ€œWalter E. Peterson Best Paper on New Technologyโ€ award for Mitigating JTAG as an Attack Surface (note: it might take a little while for the paper to be posted on IEEE Xplore; you might have to check back later).
In a prior blog, I wrote about the JTAG specificationโ€™s upcoming 30th anniversary, and reflected on how it has evolved over the years, and the powerful use cases it can be put to. This week, we look at how to secure the JTAG interface, to prevent its abuse by bad actors.
In my last article, I described how the Open Compute Project (OCP) Project Olympus server designs have been put into the public domain by Microsoft Azure. Inherent in the Olympus servers is the hardware connection between the ASPEED BMC and the CPU JTAG chain. To make the most of this connection for hardware-assisted debug and test purposes, a high-performance, secure JTAG Master function is needed within the BMC.
In two previous articles, I looked at the JTAG access port from a security perspective, and considered what exposure the choice of BMC operating system might have on a platform supporting At-Scale Debug. Now, letโ€™s consider the root of all trust, the silicon itself, and see what options exist for locking it down.
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