STATION: State Encoding-Based Attack-Resilient Sequential Obfuscation

Simple item page
Author(s)Han, Zhaokun
Author(s)Dixit, Aneesh
Author(s)Patnaik, Satwik
Author(s)Rajendran, Jeyavijayan
Date Accessioned2024-05-15T20:16:07Z
Date Available2024-05-15T20:16:07Z
Publication Date2024-04-16
DescriptionThis article was originally published in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2024.3387873. © 2024 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This article will be embargoed until 04/16/2026.
AbstractThe unauthorized duplication of design intellectual property (IP) and illegal overproduction of integrated circuits (ICs) are hardware security threats plaguing the security of the globalized IC supply chain. Researchers have developed various countermeasures such as logic locking, layout camouflaging, and split manufacturing to overcome the security threat of IP piracy and unauthorized overproduction. Logic locking is a holistic solution among all countermeasures since it safeguards the design IP against untrusted entities, such as untrusted foundries, test facilities, or end-users throughout the globalized IC supply chain. There are well-known logic locking techniques for combinational circuits with well-established security properties; however, their sequential counterparts remain vulnerable. Since most practical designs are inherently sequential, it is essential to develop secure obfuscation techniques to protect sequential designs. This paper proposes a sequential obfuscation technique, STATION, building on the principles of finite state machine encoding schemes. STATION is resilient against various attacks on sequential obfuscation–input-output (I/O) query attacks and structural attacks, including the ones targeting sequential obfuscation–which have broken all state-of-the-art sequential obfuscation techniques. STATION achieves good resilience and desired security against various I/O and structural attacks, which we ascertain by launching 9 different attacks on all tested circuits. Moreover, STATION ensures tolerable overheads in power, performance, and area, such as 8.75%, 1.22%, and 5.63% on the largest tested circuit, containing 102 inputs, 7 outputs, 6.1×104 gates, 7 flip flops, 100 states, and 3.0×103 transitions.
SponsorWe thank Prof. Kaveh Shamsi from University of Texas at Dallas for helping provide the NEOS tool suite during reviewing process [47]. We thank the members of the TAMU SETH lab for their help in improving the paper. Moreover, we thank the reviewers for providing valuable comments during the reviewing process. The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF CNS–1822848) and the DARPA grants (HR0011-20-9-0043 and M2102069) from the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program [8] and the Structured Array Hardware for Automatically Realized Applications (SAHARA) program [9]. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Government.
CitationZ. Han, A. Dixit, S. Patnaik and J. Rajendran, "STATION: State Encoding-Based Attack-Resilient Sequential Obfuscation," in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, doi: 10.1109/TCAD.2024.3387873.
ISSN1937-4151
URLhttps://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/34410
Languageen_US
PublisherIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
KeywordsIP protection
KeywordsLogic locking
KeywordsSequential obfuscation
KeywordsFinite state machine
KeywordsFSM encoding
TitleSTATION: State Encoding-Based Attack-Resilient Sequential Obfuscation
TypeArticle
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
STATION State Encoding-Based Attack-Resilient Sequential Obfuscation.pdf
Size:
2.33 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Main article
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
124 B
Format:
Item-specific license agreed upon to submission
Description:
Download
Collections
Open Access Publications