Designing ML-resilient locking at register-transfer level

Dominik Sisejkovic, Luca Collini, Benjamin Tan, Christian Pilato, Ramesh Karri, Rainer Leupers

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Various logic-locking schemes have been proposed to protect hardware from intellectual property piracy and malicious design modifications. Since traditional locking techniques are applied on the gate-level netlist after logic synthesis, they have no semantic knowledge of the design function. Data-driven, machine-learning (ML) attacks can uncover the design flaws within gate-level locking. Recent proposals on register-transfer level (RTL) locking have access to semantic hardware information. We investigate the resilience of ASSURE, a state-of-the-art RTL locking method, against ML attacks. We used the lessons learned to derive two ML-resilient RTL locking schemes built to reinforce ASSURE locking. We developed ML-driven security metrics to evaluate the schemes against an RTL adaptation of the state-of-the-art, ML-based SnapShot attack.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2022
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages769-774
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781450391429
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 10 2022
Event59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2022 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: Jul 10 2022Jul 14 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings - Design Automation Conference
ISSN (Print)0738-100X

Conference

Conference59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period7/10/227/14/22

Keywords

  • IP protection
  • RTL
  • deobfuscation
  • logic locking
  • machine learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Modeling and Simulation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Designing ML-resilient locking at register-transfer level'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this