SaTC: CORE: Small: A High Level Synthesis Approach to Logic Obfuscation

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Use of untrusted foundries for integrated circuit (IC) fabrication has raised concerns such as IC piracy and overproduction. Logic/Design locking (also known as logic obfuscation) secures design details from an untrusted fab by incorporating a locking key for hiding the functional and structural information of the circuit. This project will develop a system level methodology to design locked digital circuits which a) are rendered useless if the attacker uses any incorrect key and b) are resilient to state of the art attacks such as satisfiability attack (SAT). The project will develop several high level design optimization techniques that open new possibilities of locking design details at the system level. The main optimization goal is corruption of an application for any incorrect key. The techniques are designed to automatically inform the gate level locking constructions to achieve resiliency against SAT attacks. First, a few error critical inputs will be identified at the application level following which the architecture will be synthesized using appropriate system level decisions to render the circuit dysfunctional for wrong input key. The broader impacts of this project include a) addressing the obfuscation challenge at system level leading to more secure hardware, b) supporting graduate education through PhD students, c) research artifacts in the forms of papers, tutorials, lecture slides and open source software, and d) undergraduate mentoring and minority engagement through the University of Maryland (UMD) Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students (ACES) program and UMD Clark Doctoral Fellowships. The project repository will be maintained well beyond the duration of the project and for as long as necessary subject to university archiving guidelines and accessible via http://srivastava.umd.edu. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.