Invited: Independent Verification and Validation of Security-Aware EDA Tools and IP

Secure silicon requires a seamless integration of new tools, new IP, and design flows to help designers protect integrated circuits from increasingly sophisticated attacks. Independent Validation and Verification (IVV) of this integrated technology is important to ensure that the tools actually deliver on their security claims when used by independent parties (i.e., people who were not involved in designing the tools). This work discusses the principles and approaches for IVV of such a complex design environment, including validation of the security strength of the various hardware security techniques, such as combinational and sequential logic locking, Trojan Detection, side-channel mitigation, and blockchain-based asset management. The main challenge in running an IVV effort is to ensure that the process provides rigorous, methodical and provable evaluation of the claims of not only the component tools and IP, but whether such an integrated environment can produce security-hardened designs by a non-security expert. CCS Concepts • Hardware Very large scale integration design; Methodologies for EDA; • Security and privacy Security in hardware.