An Empirical Study on Gate Camouflaging Methods Against Circuit Partition Attack
Xueyan Wang, Qiang Zhou, Yici Cai, Gang Qu · 2017
Gate camouflaging has emerged as a leading proactive countermeasure for reverse engineering (RE) attacks. However, a recently proposed circuit partition attack (CPA) can significantly reduce the complexity of revealing the original design from a camouflaged circuit. In this paper, we first conduct an empirical study on how CPA can facilitate the state-of-the-art de-camouflaging methods to perform more efficient attacks. We then study how an equivalent class guided camouflaging approach may thwart these de-camouflaging attempts and re-establish the defense against RE. Experimental results demonstrate that (1) CPA is an effective pre-processing technique to boost de-camouflaging methods, and (2) Equivalent class guided camouflaging technique is resilient against the union of CPA and existing de-camouflaging methods.