CoLA: Convolutional Neural Network Model for Secure Low Overhead Logic Locking Assignment
Yeganeh Aghamohammadi, Amin Rezaei · 2023
Chip designers can secure their ICs against piracy and overproduction by employing logic locking and obfuscation. However, there are numerous attacks that can examine the logic-locked netlist with the assistance of an activated IC and extract the correct key using a SAT solver. In addition, when it comes to fabrication, the imposed area overhead is a challenge that needs careful attention to preserve the design goals. Thus, to assign a logic locking method that can provide security against diverse attacks and at the same time add minimal area overhead, a comprehensive understanding of the circuit structure is needed. Towards this goal, in this paper, we first build a multi-label dataset by running different attacks on benchmarks locked with existing logic locking methods and various key sizes to capture the provided level of security and overhead for each benchmark. Then we propose and analyze CoLA, a convolutional neural network model that is trained on this dataset and thus is able to map circuits to secure low-overhead locking schemes by analyzing extracted features of the benchmark circuits. Considering various resynthesized versions of the same circuits empowers CoLA to learn features beyond the structure view alone. We use a quantization method that can lower the computation overhead of feature extraction in the classification of new, unseen data, hence speeding up the locking assignment process. Results on over 10000 data show high accuracy both in the training and validation phases.