You Break I Fix: A Collaborative Approach for Strengthening Sequential Obfuscation of Hardware Intellectual Property
Abstract
Hardware intellectual property (IP) infringement is a serious concern due to the horizontal model of the semiconductor supply chain. Several untrusted entities in this globalized supply chain are entitled to white-box accessibility of the reusable and valuable hardware IPs, making them vulnerable to piracy, cloning, tampering, and reverse engineering at different phases of system-on-chip (SoC) design and fabrication. Hardware obfuscation is a design transformation mechanism to protect the IPs from being exposed to the untrusted entities by locking the functionality of the IP while hiding the design intent. Unfortunately, existing obfuscation approaches are not resistant to various functional and structural attacks that are capable of unlocking the obfuscated designs. Due to the inability to analyze an obfuscation technique from the attackers' standpoint, numerous vulnerabilities inherent to the obfuscation methods go undetected unless a true adversary discovers them. In this paper, we present a collaborative approach between two entities - one acting as a red team and another as a blue team to replicate the real attacker-defender scenario, which in return strengthens the sequential obfuscation techniques. The blue team performs sequential obfuscation of gate-level IPs. On the other hand, the red team plays the role of an adversary/evaluator and tries to unlock the design by extracting the unlocking key or recovering the obfuscation circuitries.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 17, 2020
- Accession Number
- AD1102303
Entities
People
- Md. Mahbubur Rahman
- Swarup Bhunia
- Travis Meade
- Yier Jin
Organizations
- University of Florida