IC Piracy prevention via Design Withholding and Entanglement

—Globalization of the semiconductor industry has raised serious concerns about trustworthy hardware. Particularly, an untrusted manufacturer can steal the information of a design (Reverse Engineering), and/or produce extra chips illegally (IC Piracy). Among many candidates that address these attacks, Design Withholding techniques work by replacing a part of the design with a reconfigurable block on chip, so that none of the manufactured chips will function properly until they are activated in a trusted facility, where the withheld function is restored back into the reconfigurable block on chip. However, most existing approaches are ad-hoc based, and are facing two major challenges: 1) susceptibility to a category of algorithmic attacks, from attackers in a strong position, such as a manufacturer; and 2) scaling up the defense level is checkmated by the explosion of hardware cost that has to be paid at the designer’s side. In this paper, we propose a novel protection scheme, calle...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ASPDAC
• Authors: Soroush Khaleghi, Kai Da Zhao, Wenjing Rao
• Keywords: ASPDAC 2015, Hardware