Prognostics and Secure Health Management of Electronic Systems in a Zero-Trust Environment

Prognostics and health management (PHM) is a multifaceted discipline for the assessment of product degradation and reliability. PHM techniques have been used to detect naturally occurring faults and predict their impact on the system lifetime. An interesting question is whether these techniques could be used to detect faults that are maliciously induced. Maliciously induced faults could be due to hardware threats; e.g., electronic products that are recycled, remarked, defective, cloned, or tampered (through insertion of hardware trojans), which cause undesired system behavior such as information leakage, functional failure, and maliciously induced aging. The concern is that increased outsourcing in the fabrication of electronic products has made them susceptible to the insertion of hardware threats in untrusted manufacturing facilities. This paper overviews the need to implement PHM to ensure hardware security and how the PHM community can adapt its research to ensure safe, reliable, and secure operation of systems.