Security Assessment of Dynamically Obfuscated Scan Chain Against Oracle-guided Attacks

Abstract

Logic locking has emerged as a promising solution to protect integrated circuits against piracy and tampering. However, the security provided by existing logic locking techniques is often thwarted by Boolean satisfiability (SAT)-based oracle-guided attacks. Criteria for successful SAT attacks on locked circuits include: (i) the circuit under attack is fully combinational, or (ii) the attacker has scan chain access. To address the threat posed by SAT-based attacks, we adopt the dynamically obfuscated scan chain (DOSC) architecture and illustrate its resiliency against the SAT attacks when inserted into the scan chain of an obfuscated design. We demonstrate, both mathematically and experimentally, that DOSC exponentially increases the resiliency against key extraction by SAT attack and its variants. Our results show that the mathematical estimation of attack complexity correlates to the experimental results with an accuracy of 95% or better. Along with the formal proof, we model DOSC architecture to its equivalent combinational circuit and perform SAT attack to evaluate its resiliency empirically. Our experiments demonstrate that SAT attack on DOSC-inserted benchmark circuits timeout at minimal test time overhead, and while DOSC requires less than 1% area and power overhead.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 13, 2021
Source ID
10.1145/3444960

Entities

People

  • Adib Nahiyan
  • Domenic Forte
  • Fahim Rahman
  • Farimah Farahmandi
  • Kenneth Plaks
  • M Sazadur Rahman
  • Mark Tehranipoor
  • Saverio Fazzari

Organizations

  • Booz Allen Hamilton
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • University of Florida

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Aerial Unmanned Vehicle Swarm Micro Periodontal Dentistry.
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Operations Research