Treffer: Vulnerability Assessment of Logic Locking Techniques: Towards Next Generation Attacks on Logic Locking

To save the ever-increasing costs of maintaining an integrated circuit (IC) supply chain facility, take advantage of cutting-edge technology nodes, and meet the market demand, the manufacturing supply chain of ICs is globally distributed, known as the horizontal model in the supply chain. In the IC supply chain's horizontal model, separate entities fulfill various stages of design, fabrication, testing, packaging, and integration of ICs, forming a globally distributed chain. Outsourcing different stages of the manufacturing supply chain to the third-party facilities with no reliable monitoring on them results in identifying them as untrusted entities. Involving untrusted third-party facilities in supply chain manufacturing has introduced multiple forms of security threats such as IC overproduction, hardware Trojan insertion, reverse engineering (RE), intellectual property (IP) theft, and counterfeiting. To combat these threats, many design-for-trust countermeasure mechanisms have been widely studied in the literature, such as watermarking, IC metering, IC camouflaging, split manufacturing, and logic obfuscation. Amongst them, logic obfuscation a.k.a. logic locking, as a proactive scheme, has received significant attention in recent years, in which the designer would be able to add post-manufacturing programming capability into the circuits. Logic obfuscation is the process of hiding the correct functionality of a circuit, during the stages at untrusted parties, when the programming value, referred to as the key, is unknown. Only once the correct key is provided, the circuit behaves correctly, and the correct key would be initiated and stored in a tamper-proof non-volatile memory after fabrication at a trusted party. However, the introduction of different de-obfuscation attacks, particularly Boolean satisfiability (SAT)-based attacks, have undermined the effectiveness of the vast majority of existing logic locking countermeasures. The evolution of different de-obfuscation attacks in recent years results in the ...