Security Assessment of Microfluidic Fully-Programmable-Valve-Array Biochips

摘要

The fully-programmable-valve-array (FPVA) is a general-purpose programmable flow-based microfluidic platform, akin to the VLSI field-programmable gate array (FPGA). FPVAs are dynamically reconfigurable and hence are suitable in a broad spectrum of applications involving immunoassays and cell analysis. Since these applications are safety-critical, addressing security concerns is vital for the success and adoption of FPVAs. This study evaluates the security of FPVA biochips. We show that FPVAs are vulnerable to malicious operations similar to digital and flow-based microfluidic biochips. FPVAs are further prone to new classes of attacks - tunneling and deliberate aging. The study establishes security metrics and describes possible attacks on real-life bioassays.