A New Logic Encryption Strategy Ensuring Key Interdependency
Rajit Karmakar, Neeli Rashmi Prasad, Santanu Chattopadhyay, Rohit Kapur, Indranil Sengupta · 2017
With the globalization of IC design flow, many fabless companies outsource the fabrication of their design to off-site foundries. As these foundries may not always be trusted, it results in security vulnerabilities and threats such as counterfeiting, IP piracy, reverse engineering, overbuilding and Hardware Trojans. Logic encryption has emerged to be a potential solution to secure the design against these threats. It introduces some extra hardware (key-gates) into the design to hide the functionality from unauthorized users, using secret keys. The locations of insertion of key-gates determine the quality of the security provided by the resulting design. In this paper, we propose a new logic encryption technique, which judiciously inserts key-gates into the design and introduces some extra gates to satisfy two major criteria - high dependency between the keys and high output corruption for wrong keys, to ensure the quality of encryption. Experimental results show that our proposed method offer high security with reasonably low overhead for practically larger circuits.