Hardware-Efficient Compound IC Protection with Lightweight Cryptography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hardware-efficient IC protection method combining lightweight cryptography with logic locking and obfuscation, offering security with reduced hardware complexity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel compound protection mechanism that is more hardware-efficient and resilient to attacks than previous cryptography-based techniques.

Findings

Secure designs have significantly less hardware complexity.

The method is resilient to removal, algebraic, and logic locking attacks.

Experimental results demonstrate improved efficiency over prior cryptography-based methods.

Abstract

Over the years, many techniques have been introduced to protect integrated circuits (ICs) from hardware security threats that emerged in the globalized IC manufacturing supply chain, such as overproduction and piracy. However, most of these techniques have been rendered inefficient since they do not rely on provably secure algorithms. Moreover, the previously proposed techniques using cryptography algorithms lead to a significant increase in hardware complexity and are vulnerable to the removal and power analysis attacks. In this paper, we propose a compound IC protection mechanism that uses a lightweight cryptography algorithm with prominent logic locking and hardware obfuscation techniques. Experimental results show that the secure designs generated by the developed tool have significantly less hardware complexity when compared to those generated by previously proposed techniques using cryptography algorithms and are resilient to existing removal, algebraic, and logic locking attacks.