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The hardware intellectual property (IP) cores from untrusted vendors are widely used, which has raised security concerns for system designers. Although formal methods provide powerful solutions for detecting malicious behaviors in hardware, the participation of manual work prevents the methods from practical applications. Information Flow Tracking (IFT) is a powerful approach to prevent sensitive information leakage. However, existing IFT solutions are either introducing overhead in hardware or lacking practical automatic working procedures. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a framework that fully automates information leakage detection in the gate level of hardware. This framework introduces Z3, an SMT solver, in checking the violation of the confidentiality automatically. On the other hand, a parser converting the gate-level hardware to the formal model is developed to further remove the manual workload. To validate the effectiveness, the proposed solution is tested on 11 gate-level netlist benchmarks. The Trojans leaking information from circuit outputs can be automatically detected. We also account for time consumption during the whole working procedure to show the efficiency of the proposed approach. 

Various hardware security solutions have been developed recently to help counter hardware level attacks such as hardware Trojan, integrated circuit (IC) counterfeiting and intellectual property (IP) clone/piracy. However, existing solutions often provide specific types of protections. While these solutions achieve great success in preventing even advanced hardware attacks, the compatibility of among these hardware security methods are rarely discussed. The inconsistency hampers with the development of a comprehensive solution for hardware IC and IP from various attacks. In this paper, we develop a security primitive generator to help solve the compatibility issue among different protection techniques. Specifically, we focus on two modern IC/IP protection methods, logic locking and watermarking. A combined locking and watermarking technique is developed based on enhanced finite state machines (FSMs). The security primitive generator will take user-specified constraints and automatically generate an FSM module to perform both logic locking and watermarking. The generated FSM can be integrated into any designs for protection. Our experimental results show that the generator can facilitate circuit protection and provide the flexibility for users to achieve a better tradeoff between security levels and design overheads.