Untrusted foundries pose threats of integrated circuit (IC) piracy and counterfeiting, and this has motivated research into logic locking. Strong logic locking approaches potentially prevent piracy and counterfeiting by preventing unauthorized replication and use of ICs. Unfortunately, recent work has shown that most state-of-the-art logic locking techniques are vulnerable to attacks that utilize Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solvers. In this article, we extend our prior work on using silicon nanowire (SiNW) field-effect transistors (FETs) to produce obfuscated ICs that are resistant to reverse engineering attacks, such as the sensitization attack, SAT and approximate SAT attacks, as well as tracked signal attacks. Our method is based on exchanging some logic gates in the original design with a set of polymorphic gates (PLGs), designed using SiNW FETs, and augmenting the circuit with a small block, whose output is untraceable, namely, URSAT. The URSAT may not offer very strong resilience against the combined AppSAT-removal attack. Strong URSAT is achieved using only CMOS-logic gates, namely, S-URSAT. The proposed technique, S-URSAT + PLG-based traditional encryption, designed using SiNW FETs, increases the security level of the design to robustly thwart all existing attacks, including combined AppSAT-removal attack, with small penalties. Then, we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed methods and subject it to a thorough security analysis. We also evaluate the performance penalty of the technique and find that it results in very small overheads in comparison to other works. The average area, power, and delay overheads of implementing 64 baseline key-bits of S-URSAT for small benchmarks are 5.03%, 2.60%, and −2.26%, respectively, while for large benchmarks they are 2.37%, 1.18%, and −1.93%.

Due to the outsourcing of chip manufacturing, countermeasures against Integrated Circuit (IC) piracy, reverse engineering, IC overbuilding and hardware Trojans (HTs) become a hot research topic. To protect an IC from these attacks, logic encryption techniques have been considered as a low-cost defense mechanism. In this paper, our proposal is to insert the multiplexer (MUX) with two cases: (i) we randomly insert MUXs equal to half of the output bit number (half MUX insertions); and (ii) we insert MUXs equal to the number of output bits (full MUX insertions). Hamming distance is adopted as a security evaluation. We also measure the delay, power and area overheads with the proposed technique.

Due to the globalization of Integrated Circuit (IC) design in the semiconductor industry and the outsourcing of chip manufacturing, Third-Party Intellectual Properties (3PIPs) become vulnerable to IP piracy, reverse engineering, counterfeit IC, and hardware trojans. To thwart such attacks, ICs can be protected using logic encryption techniques. However, strong resilient techniques incur significant overheads. Side-channel attacks (SCAs) further complicate matters by introducing potential attacks post fabrication. One of the most severe SCAs is power analysis (PA) attacks, in which an attacker can observe the power variations of the device and analyze them to extract the secret key. PA attacks can be mitigated via adding large extra hardware; however, the overheads of such solutions can render them impractical, especially when there are power and area constraints. All Spin Logic Device (ASLD) is one of the most promising spintronic devices due to its unique properties: small area, no spin-charge signal conversion, zero leakage current, non-volatile memory, high density, low operating voltage, and its compatibility with conventional CMOS technology. In this article, we extend the work in Reference [1] on the usage of ASLD to produce secure and resilient circuits that withstand IC attacks (during the fabrication) and PA attacks (after fabrication), including reverse engineering attacks. First, we show that ASLD has another unique feature: identical power dissipation through the switching operations, where such properties can be effectively used to prevent PA and IC attacks. We then evaluate the proposed ASLD-based on performance overheads and security guarantees.

Abstract:The outsourcing of integrated circuit (IC) fabrication services to overseas manufacturing foundry has raised security and privacy concerns with regard to intellectual property (IP) protection as well as the integrity maintenance of the fabricated chips. One way to protect ICs from malicious attacks is to encrypt and obfuscate the IP design by incorporating additional key gates, namely logic encryption or logic locking. The state-of-the-art logic encryption techniques certainly incur considerable performance overhead upon the genuine IP design. The focus of this paper is to leverage the unique property of emerging transistor technology on reducing the performance overhead as well as preserving the robustness of logic locking technique. We design the polymorphic logic gate using silicon nanowire field effect transistors (SiNW FETs) to replace the conventional Exclusive-OR (XOR)-based logic cone. We then evaluate the proposed technique based on security metric and performance overhead.

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