Publication
Enhancing Resilience against Sequential Attacks on Logic Locking using Evolutionary Strategies
Marcel Merten; Mohammed E. Djeridane; Muhammad Hassan; Niladri Bhattacharjee; Jens Trommer; Thomas Mikolajick; Rolf Drechsler
In: 36. GI/GMM/ITG Testmethoden und Zuverlässigkeit von Schaltungen und Systemen (TuZ). GI/GMM/ITG Workshop Testmethoden und Zuverlässigkeit von Schaltungen und Systemen (TuZ-2024), February 25-27, Darmstadt, Germany, 2024.
Abstract
Today, the manufacturing of Integrated Circuits (ICs)
is highly distributed over various foundries, yielding long
and untrustworthy supply chains. Therefore, severe security
concerns about threats like intellectual property theft arise. Logic
Locking (LL) is one well-known technique to protect a given
design by introducing a secret key. Recent research increased the
protection of LL mechanisms on sequential circuits by blocking
access to the scan chain. However, state-of-the-art sequential
attacks unlock the protection mechanism within a reasonable
time resulting in a serious security threat. This work proposes a
novel approach to improve resilience against sequential attacks.
In particular, an Evolutionary Strategy (ES) is established to
optimize the LL placement and improve the protection of the
secret key. The experimental evaluation proves that the proposed
hardening significantly increases the protection against sequential
attacks.