Sh. Zamanzadeh; A. Jahanian
Abstract
Fab-less business model in semiconductor industry has led to serious concerns about trustworthy hardware. In untrusted foundries and manufacturing companies, submitted layout may be analyzed and reverse engineered to steal the information of a design or insert malicious Trojans. Understanding the netlist ...
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Fab-less business model in semiconductor industry has led to serious concerns about trustworthy hardware. In untrusted foundries and manufacturing companies, submitted layout may be analyzed and reverse engineered to steal the information of a design or insert malicious Trojans. Understanding the netlist topology is the ultimate goal of the reverse engineering process. In this paper, we propose a netlist encryption mechanism to hide the interconnect topology inside an IC. Moreover, new special standard cells (Wire Scrambling cells) are designed to play the role of netlist encryption. Furthermore, a design ow is proposed to insert the WS-cells inside the netlist with the aim of maximum obfuscation and minimum overhead. It is worth noting that this mechanism is fully automated with no need to detail information of the functionality and structure of the design. Our proposed mechanism is implemented in an academic physical design framework (EduCAD). Experimental results show that reverse engineering can be hindered considerably in cost of negligible overheads by 23% in area, 3.25% in delay and 14.5% in total wire length. Reverse engineering is evaluated by brute-force attack, and the learned information is 0% and the Hamming distance is approximately 50%.
Sh. Zamanzadeh; A. Jahanian
Abstract
FPGA platforms have been widely used in many modern digital applications due to their low prototyping cost, short time-to-market and flexibility. Field-programmability of FPGA bitstream has made it as a flexible and easy-to-use platform. However, access to bitstream degraded the security of FPGA IPs ...
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FPGA platforms have been widely used in many modern digital applications due to their low prototyping cost, short time-to-market and flexibility. Field-programmability of FPGA bitstream has made it as a flexible and easy-to-use platform. However, access to bitstream degraded the security of FPGA IPs because there is no efficient method to authenticate the originality of bitstream by the FPGA programmer. The issue of secure transmission of configuration information to the FPGAs is of paramount importance to both users and IP providers. In this paper we presented a "Self Authentication" methodology in which the originality of sub-components in bitstream is authenticated in parallel with the intrinsic operation of the design. In the case of discovering violation, the normal data flow is obfuscated and the circuit would be locked. Experimental results show that this methodology considerably improves the IP security against malicious updates with reasonable overheads.