IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March 2018 - 111

Hardware Matters

Shielding CE Hardware Against
Reverse-Engineering Attacks
Through Functional Locking
By Deepak Kachave and Anirban Sengupta

T

he surging design productivity of
modern consumer electronics
(CE) devices has only been possi-
ble due to the employment of
reusable intellectual property (IP) cores
in its hardware design. However, the IP
core design process is vulnerable to
threats in the design flow such as re-
verse-engineering attacks that aim to
clone (and pirate) or insert malicious
Trojan logic in the design netlist. Thus,
the key is protecting the IP design netlist
from unwanted access. This article
proposes an IP core with a low-cost
functional locking methodology that
safeguards the design netlist from rogue
elements in design flow intending at-
tacks. The presented approach achieves
cost reduction of functionally locked IP
core design and enhanced security ag-
ainst reverse-engineering attacks.

PROTECTING IP CORE
The continuous technology scaling has
resulted in increased demand for CE
devices with smaller device dimen-
sions. Furthermore, to obtain a compet-
itive edge, the CE industry targets very
short time-to-market deadlines. To
meet these deadlines, designers heavily
rely on reusable IP cores. The rapid
rate of technology scaling demands fre-
quent modernization of fabrication
facilities. Thus, the CE industry is be-
ing pushed to become fabless for rea-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2017.2776464
Date of publication: 8 February 2018

sonable profit margin. Fabless design
houses also need to ensure that their IP
is protected from security threats such
as IP piracy, reverse engineering, and
Trojan insertion during untrustworthy
phases of the integrated circuit (IC)
design flow [1], [2], [7], [8].
Various techniques to protect IP cores
from aforementioned threats have been
suggested in the literature such as IP
metering and digital watermarking. One
such technique that has gained the atten-
tion of the research community is logic
locking [2], [3]. Locking is a technique
that inserts locking units in the design
such that the design cannot generate cor-
rect functionality until a valid key is
applied to the locked circuit. The propo-
sed approach presents a novel IP core
functional locking methodology for gen-
erating a low-powered, highly secured IP
core using IP locking blocks (ILBs).

LOCKING TECHNIQUES
IN PRIOR WORK
The locking techniques presented in [2]
and [3] provide security features that
ensure the security of the logic locking
against key sensitization attacks. The
proposed approach enhances these
security features by ensuring robustness
against key sensitization attacks. Fur-
thermore, [2] and [3] can provide pair-
wise security. However, the proposed IP
core locking block provides multi-pair-
wise security features (8-bit key per
output data bit), ensuring enhanced
robustness and security. Moreover, the

proposed approach can enhance the secu-
rity of key bits, as it introduces an ILB
comprising of a hybrid combination of
various AND, NAND, NOT, XOR,
XNOR gates that are only actuated by the
application of a unique predetermined
sequence of key bits. However for [2],
only the XOR/XNOR pairing was pre-
sented for a locking unit. Furthermore,
[2] and [3] do not consider any optimiza-
tion mechanism to reduce power or
design cost overhead of locked netlist
comprising logic-locking cells; this leads
to higher power and design overhead.

PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
THREAT MODEL
The presented process, as shown in Fig-
ure 1, shields an IP core by augmenting
the convolution of reverse engineering
through robust functional locking of an
IP netlist (of CE hardware) from an
attacker present anywhere in the design
flow (in the untrustworthy design regime
between post-netlist creation and the pre-
manufacturing stage of CE hardware).

IP CORE LOCKING METHODOLOGY
The presented functional locking pro-
cess for IP cores encompasses two main
stages, including IP functional locking
and particle swarm optimization-based
design space exploration (PSO-DSE) [4]
(as shown in Figure 2). The execution of
the proposed process begins with PSO-
DSE framework that is responsible
exploring a low-cost functional locked

March 2018

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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

111



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