skip to main content

Explore Research Products in the NSF-PAR

Title: Securing Hardware via Dynamic Obfuscation Utilizing Reconfigurable Interconnect and Logic Blocks
Maximizing profits while minimizing risk in a technologically advanced silicon industry has motivated the globalization of the fabrication process and electronic hardware supply chain. However, with the increasing magnitude of successful hardware attacks, the security of many hardware IPs has been compromised. Many existing security works have focused on resolving a single vulnerability while neglecting other threats. This motivated to propose a novel approach for securing hardware IPs during the fabrication process and supply chain via logic obfuscation by utilizing emerging spin-based devices. Our proposed dynamic obfuscation approach uses reconfigurable logic and interconnects blocks (RIL-Blocks), consisting of Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM)-based Look Up Tables and switch boxes flexibility and resiliency against state-of-the-art SAT-based attacks and power side-channel attacks while incurring a small overhead. The proposed Scan Enabled Obfuscation circuitry obfuscates the oracle circuit’s responses and further fortifies the logic and routing obfuscation provided by the RIL-Blocks, resembling a defense-in-depth approach. The empirical evaluation of security provided by the proposed RIL-Blocks on the ISCAS benchmark and common evaluation platform (CEP) circuit shows that resiliency comes with reduced overhead while providing resiliency to various hardware security threats.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2200446
NSF-PAR ID:
10360795
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
229 to 234
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ( , 22nd International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED))
    null (Ed.)
    Logic locking has been widely evaluated as a proactive countermeasure against the hardware security threats within the IC supply chain. However, the introduction of the SAT attack, and many of its derivatives, has raised big concern about this form of countermeasure. In this paper, we explore the possibility of exploiting chaos computing as a new means of logic locking. We introduce the concept of chaotic logic locking, called ChaoLock, in which, by leveraging asymmetric inputs in digital chaotic Boolean gates, we define the concept of programmability (key-configurability) to the sets of underlying initial conditions and system parameters. These initial conditions and system parameters determine the operation (functionality) of each digital chaotic Boolean gate. Also, by proposing dummy inputs in chaotic Boolean gates, we show that during reverse-engineering, the dummy inputs conceal the main functionality of the chaotic Boolean gates, which make the reverse-engineering almost impossible. By performing a security analysis of ChaoLock, we show that with no restriction on conventional CMOS-based ASIC implementation and with no test/debug compromising, none of the state-of-the-art attacks on logic locking, including the SAT attack, could reformulate chaotic Boolean gates while dummy inputs are involved and their parameters are locked. Our analysis and experimental results show that with a low number of chaotic Boolean gates mixed with CMOS digital gates, ChaoLock can guarantee resiliency against the state-of-the-art attacks on logic locking at low overhead. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , DAC '22: Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference)
    Modern semiconductor manufacturing often leverages a fabless model in which design and fabrication are partitioned. This has led to a large body of work attempting to secure designs sent to an untrusted third party through obfuscation methods. On the other hand, efficient de-obfuscation attacks have been proposed, such as Boolean Satisfiability attacks (SAT attacks). However, there is a lack of frameworks to validate the security and functionality of obfuscated designs. Additionally, unconventional obfuscated design flows, which vary from one obfuscation to another, have been key impending factors in realizing logic locking as a mainstream approach for securing designs. In this work, we address these two issues for Lookup Table-based obfuscation. We study both Volatile and Non-volatile versions of LUT-based obfuscation and develop a framework to validate SAT runtime using machine learning. We can achieve unparallel SAT-resiliency using LUT-based obfuscation while incurring 7% area and less than 1% power overheads. Following this, we discuss and implement a validation flow for obfuscated designs. We then fabricate a chip consisting of several benchmark designs and a RISC-V CPU in TSMC 65nm for post functionality validation. We show that the design flow and SAT-runtime validation can easily integrate LUT-based obfuscation into existing CAD tools while adding minimal verification overhead. Finally, we justify SAT-resilient LUT-based obfuscation as a promising candidate for securing designs. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ( , Journal of Hardware and Systems Security)
    Piracy and overproduction of hardware intellectual properties are growing concerns for the semiconductor industry under the fabless paradigm. Although chip designers have attempted to secure their designs against these threats by means of logic locking and obfuscation, due to the increasing number of powerful oracle-guided attacks, they are facing an ever-increasing challenge in evaluating the security of their designs and their associated overhead. Especially while many so-called "provable" logic locking techniques are subjected to a novel attack surface, overcoming these attacks may impose a huge overhead on the circuit. Thus, in this paper, after investigating the shortcoming of state-of-the-art graph neural network models in logic locking and refuting the use of hamming distance as a proper key accuracy metric, we employ two machine learning models, a decision tree to predict the security degree of the locked benchmarks and a convolutional neural network to assign a low-overhead and secure locking scheme to a given circuit. We first build multi-label datasets by running different attacks on locked benchmarks with existing logic locking methods to evaluate the security and compute the imposed area overhead. Then, we design and train a decision tree model to learn the features of the created dataset and predict the security degree of each given locked circuit. Furthermore, we utilize a convolutional neural network model to extract more features, obtain higher accuracy, and consider overhead. Then, we put our trained models to the test against different unseen benchmarks. The experimental results reveal that the convolutional neural network model has a higher capability for extracting features from unseen, large datasets which comes in handy in assigning secure and low-overhead logic locking to a given netlist. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ( , 2019 ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, GLSVLSI 2019)
    To reduce the cost of ICs and to meet the market's demand, a considerable portion of manufacturing supply chain, including silicon fabrication, packaging and testing may be pushed offshore. Utilizing a global IC manufacturing supply chain, and inclusion of non-trusted parties in the supply chain has raised concerns over security and trust related challenges including those of overproduction, counterfeiting, IP piracy, and Hardware Trojans to name a few. To reduce the risk of IC manufacturing in an untrusted and globally distributed supply chain, the researchers have proposed various locking and obfuscation mechanisms for hiding the functionality of the ICs during the manufacturing, that requires the activation of the IP after fabrication using the key value(s) that is only known to the IP/IC owner. At the same time, many such proposed obfuscation and locking mechanisms are broken with attacks that exploit the inherent vulnerabilities in such solutions. The past decade of research in this area, has resulted in many such defense and attack solutions. In this paper, we review a decade of research on hardware obfuscation from an attacker perspective, elaborate on attack and defense lessons learned, and discuss future directions that could be exploited for building stronger defenses. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ( , IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NOCS))
    null (Ed.)
    System-on-Chips (SoCs) are designed using different Intellectual Property (IP) blocks from multiple third-party vendors to reduce design cost while meeting aggressive time-to-market constraints. Designing trustworthy SoCs need to address the increasing concerns related to supply-chain security vulnerabilities. Malicious implants on IPs, such as Hardware Trojans (HTs) are one of the significant security threats in designing trustworthy SoCs. It is a major challenge to detect Trojans in complex multi-processor SoCs using conventional pre- and post-silicon validation methodologies. Packet-based Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a widely used solution for on-chip communication between IPs in complex SoCs. The focus of this paper is to enable trusted NoC communication in the presence of potentially untrusted IPs. This paper makes three key contributions. (1) We model an HT in NoC router that activates misrouting of the packets to initiate denial of service, delay of service, and injection suppression. (2) We propose a dynamic shielding technique that isolates the identified HT infected IP. (3) We present a secure routing algorithm to bypass the HT infected NoC router. Experimental results on HT infected NoC demonstrate that the proposed method reduces effective average packet latency by 38% in real benchmarks and 48% in synthetic traffic patterns. Our method also increases throughput and reduces effective average deflected packet latency by 62% in real benchmarks and 97% in synthetic traffic patterns. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email