A conflict-free approach for parallelizing SAT-based de-camouflaging attacks
Xueyan Wang, Qiang Zhou, Yici Cai, Gang Qu · Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference · 2018
As one of the most effective proactive countermeasures against reverse engineering, circuit camouflaging has emerged to be a hot research topic and it is becoming a mature technology with the development of various de-camouflaging attacks. Among them, the SAT-based method is the most powerful one to defeat circuit camouflaging. However, SAT-based attacks have scalability problem due to the complexity of the underlying SAT solvers, and straightforward approach to parallelize SAT-based attacks will fail. In this paper, we propose a two-level partition method (independent module partitioning and k-medoids clustering), together with a novel conflict avoidance strategy to solve the problem. Experimental results on OpenSparc T1 microprocessor controller demonstrate that our approach can on average reduce the scales of the SAT formulas by more than 50% and achieve 3.6x speedup on the best-known SAT-based de-camouflaging tool.