K-Gate Lock: Multi-Key Logic Locking Using Input Encoding Against Oracle-Guided Attacks

TL;DR

The paper introduces K-Gate Lock, a multi-key logic locking method that encodes input patterns with multiple keys, significantly enhancing security against oracle-guided attacks while maintaining practical overheads.

Contribution

It proposes and evaluates a novel multi-key logic locking technique called K-Gate Lock, which improves security against SAT-based attacks compared to traditional single-key methods.

Findings

K-Gate Lock effectively resists oracle-guided attacks.

Using multiple keys exponentially increases attack complexity.

The method maintains reasonable power and performance overheads.

Abstract

Logic locking has emerged to prevent piracy and overproduction of integrated circuits ever since the split of the design house and manufacturing foundry was established. While there has been a lot of research using a single global key to lock the circuit, even the most sophisticated single-key locking methods have been shown to be vulnerable to powerful SAT-based oracle-guided attacks that can extract the correct key with the help of an activated chip bought off the market and the locked netlist leaked from the untrusted foundry. To address this challenge, we propose, implement, and evaluate a novel logic locking method called K-Gate Lock that encodes input patterns using multiple keys that are applied to one set of key inputs at different operational times. Our comprehensive experimental results confirm that using multiple keys will make the circuit secure against oracle-guided attacks and increase attacker efforts to an exponentially time-consuming brute force search. K-Gate Lock has reasonable power and performance overheads, making it a practical solution for real-world hardware intellectual property protection.