A Security-aware and LUT-based CAD Flow for the Physical Synthesis of eASICs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a security-aware, LUT-based CAD flow for physical synthesis of eASICs, combining obfuscation with performance optimization, and demonstrates its effectiveness through security analysis and physical implementation results.

Contribution

It presents a novel CAD flow for eASICs that balances security and performance, integrating obfuscation techniques with standard physical synthesis processes.

Findings

Obfuscation rate of at least 45% withstands traditional attacks.

Obfuscation rate of at least 80% withstands template-based attacks.

Achieves 368MHz frequency in 65nm technology with high security.

Abstract

Numerous threats are associated with the globalized integrated circuit (IC) supply chain, such as piracy, reverse engineering, overproduction, and malicious logic insertion. Many obfuscation approaches have been proposed to mitigate these threats by preventing an adversary from fully understanding the IC (or parts of it). The use of reconfigurable elements inside an IC is a known obfuscation technique, either as a coarse grain reconfigurable block (i.e., eFPGA) or as a fine grain element (i.e., FPGA-like look-up tables). This paper presents a security-aware CAD flow that is LUT-based yet still compatible with the standard cell based physical synthesis flow. More precisely, our CAD flow explores the FPGA-ASIC design space and produces heavily obfuscated designs where only small portions of the logic resemble an ASIC. Therefore, we term this specialized solution an "embedded ASIC" (eASIC). Nevertheless, even for heavily LUT-dominated designs, our proposed decomposition and pin swapping algorithms allow for performance gains that enable performance levels that only ASICs would otherwise achieve. On the security side, we have developed novel template-based attacks and also applied existing attacks, both oracle-free and oracle-based. Our security analysis revealed that the obfuscation rate for an SHA-256 study case should be at least 45% for withstanding traditional attacks and at least 80% for withstanding template-based attacks. When the 80\% obfuscated SHA-256 design is physically implemented, it achieves a remarkable frequency of 368MHz in a 65nm commercial technology, whereas its FPGA implementation (in a superior technology) achieves only 77MHz.