Reverse engineering camouflaged sequential circuits without scan access

Mohamed El Massad, Siddharth Garg, Mahesh Tripunitara

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

Abstract

Integrated circuit (IC) camouflaging is a promising technique to protect the design of a chip from reverse engineering. However, recent work has shown that even camouflaged ICs can be reverse engineered from the observed input/output behaviour of a chip using SAT solvers. However, these so-called SAT attacks have so far targeted only camouflaged combinational circuits. For camouflaged sequential circuits, the SAT attack requires that the internal state of the circuit is controllable and observable via the scan chain. It has been implicitly assumed that restricting scan chain access increases the security of camouflaged ICs from reverse engineering attacks. In this paper, we develop a new attack methodology to decamouflage sequential circuits without scan access. Our attack uses a model checker (a more powerful reasoning tool than a SAT solver) to find a discriminating set of input sequences, i.e., one that is sufficient to determine the functionality of camouflaged gates. We propose several refinements, including the use of a bounded model checker, and sufficient conditions for determining when a set of input sequences is discriminating to improve the run-time and scalabilty of our attack. Our attack is able to decamouflage a large sequential benchmark circuit that implements a subset of the VIPER processor.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2017
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages33-40
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781538630938
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 13 2017
Event36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2017 - Irvine, United States
Duration: Nov 13 2017Nov 16 2017

Publication series

NameIEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers, ICCAD
Volume2017-November
ISSN (Print)1092-3152

Other

Other36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityIrvine
Period11/13/1711/16/17

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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