Remote Device Management via Smart Contracts

With the continued scaling of transistor feature size, the cost of IC development has been escalating. The economics of semiconductor IC development favors high volume manufacturing, while high volume cannot be attained without developing an IC that serves many applications. Some of these applications are in low-margin Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where an SoC cannot command a high price. Consequently, without the ability to customize IC features after production, its lowest-priced application will determine an IC’s price. This motivates the manufacturers to develop chips with provisions for post-manufacturing IC customization. This paper explores how an IC can be programmed repeatedly and securely using blockchain-based smart contracts to allow users to upgrade or rent features. The availability of such a system could, for example, allow a buyer to upgrade her processor from a low-end to a high-end part by making an additional payment to the manufacturer. Implementing such a system will require remote device management capabilities. Remote device management presents unique design considerations, such as, necessity for transparency of the actions that a device takes on behalf of a user; the requirement of a trusted arbiter; and provision for management of these devices beyond the intended lifespan. To overcome the challenges of transparency, longevity, and the necessity of a trusted arbiter, we propose embedded smart contracts in concert with a blockchain. Our proposed smart contract takes the device feature configuration request as input and outputs the corresponding configuration. To support remote, secure, and authorized updates, we propose an on-die hardware module which communicates with the smart contract and enforces its functionalities. This was prototyped using a programmable system-on-chip working in concert with Ethereum blockchain. The prototype demonstrates the feasibility and practicality of the proposed solution.