NoXLock: SiP Activation and Licensing through Obfuscated on-Chip Network and Fuzzy Traffic
Md Saad Ul Haque, Azim Uddin, Jingbo Zhou, Hadi Mardani Kamali, Farimah Farahmandi, Mark Mohammad Tehranipoor · 2025
Countermeasures designed to protect system-on-chip (SoC) from intellectual property (IP) counterfeiting are inadequate for heterogeneously integrated systems-in-packages (SiP) due to shifts in manufacturing flow. Additionally, traditional obfuscation methods are now compromised by emerging deobfuscation techniques. This paper introduces network-on-chip (NoC) obfuscation, NoXLock, to effectively safeguard the IP of SiP designs. By obfuscating the routing algorithm, the performance of unauthorized SiPs, including throughput and packet loss, is effectively constrained. To securely activate the system, a novel method utilizing dynamic traffic patterns is proposed. Extensive security analyses and experimental results in this paper demonstrate that NoXLock resists state-of-the-art attacks, including oracle-guided SAT, oracle-less removal, and probing-based methods, without imposing a significant penalty on power, performance, and area (PPA) overheads.