Customized locking of IP blocks on a multi-million-gate SoC

A Sengupta, M Ashraf, M Nabeel… - 2018 IEEE/ACM …, 2018 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design …, 2018ieeexplore.ieee.org
Reliance on off-site untrusted fabrication facilities has given rise to several threats such as
intellectual property (IP) piracy, overbuilding and hardware Trojans. Logic locking is a
promising defense technique against such malicious activities that is effected at the silicon
layer. Over the past decade, several logic locking defenses and attacks have been
presented, thereby, enhancing the state-of-the-art. Nevertheless, there has been little
research aiming to demonstrate the applicability of logic locking with large-scale multi …
Reliance on off-site untrusted fabrication facilities has given rise to several threats such as intellectual property (IP) piracy, overbuilding and hardware Trojans. Logic locking is a promising defense technique against such malicious activities that is effected at the silicon layer. Over the past decade, several logic locking defenses and attacks have been presented, thereby, enhancing the state-of-the-art. Nevertheless, there has been little research aiming to demonstrate the applicability of logic locking with large-scale multi-million-gate industrial designs consisting of multiple IP blocks with different security requirements. In this work, we take on this challenge to successfully lock a multi-million-gate system-on-chip (SoC) provided by DARPA by taking it all the way to GDSII layout. We analyze how specific features, constraints, and security requirements of an IP block can be leveraged to lock its functionality in the most appropriate way. We show that the blocks of an SoC can be locked in a customized manner at 0.5%, 15.3%, and 1.5% chip-level overhead in power, performance, and area, respectively.
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