Hardware obfuscation using PUF-based logic
James B. Wendt, Miodrag Potkonjak · 2014
There is a great need to develop universal and robust techniques for intellectual property protection of integrated circuits. In this paper, we introduce techniques for the obfuscation of an arbitrary circuit by using physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and programmable logic. Specifically, we introduce the notion of PUF-based logic which can be configured to be functionally equivalent to any arbitrary design, as well as a new architecture for wire merging that obfuscates signal paths exponentially. We systematically apply our techniques in such a way so as to maximize obfuscation while minimizing area and delay overhead. We analyze our techniques on popular benchmark circuits and show them to be resilient against very powerful reverse engineering attacks in which the adversary has knowledge of the complete netlist along with the ability to read and write to any flip-flop in the circuit.