Cute-Lock: Behavioral and Structural Multi-Key Logic Locking Using Time Base Keys

TL;DR

Cute-Lock introduces a multi-key logic locking approach using time-based keys, enhancing security against various attacks in both behavioral and structural circuit representations without extra overhead.

Contribution

It proposes and evaluates a novel multi-key logic locking scheme called Cute-Lock that is resistant to multiple attack types in RTL and netlist forms.

Findings

Effective resistance to oracle-guided, removal, and dataflow attacks.

No additional overhead compared to existing methods.

Applicable to both behavioral and structural circuit models.

Abstract

The outsourcing of semiconductor manufacturing raises security risks, such as piracy and overproduction of hardware intellectual property. To overcome this challenge, logic locking has emerged to lock a given circuit using additional key bits. While single-key logic locking approaches have demonstrated serious vulnerability to a wide range of attacks, multi-key solutions, if carefully designed, can provide a reliable defense against not only oracle-guided logic attacks, but also removal and dataflow attacks. In this paper, using time base keys, we propose, implement and evaluate a family of secure multi-key logic locking algorithms called Cute-Lock that can be applied both in RTL-level behavioral and netlist-level structural representations of sequential circuits. Our extensive experimental results under a diverse range of attacks confirm that, compared to vulnerable state-of-the-art methods, employing the Cute-Lock family drives attacking attempts to a dead end without additional overhead.