A New Hardware Trojan Attack on Scan-obfuscated Logic-locked Circuits
Anjum Riaz, Gaurav Kumar, Yamuna Prasad, Satyadev Ahlawat, Virendra Singh · 2025
Logic locking has emerged as a crucial defense mechanism for securing ICs against threats such as IP theft, counterfeiting, and Hardware Trojans (HTs). However, advanced attacks like Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) attack have exposed vulnerabilities by exploiting scan-unlocked oracle to retrieve secret keys. To mitigate this risk, scan obfuscation techniques were introduced to secure scan access and enhance protection against SAT attack. However, ScanSAT attack has been shown to bypass these defenses, successfully retrieving secret keys even from scan-obfuscated circuits. Recently, a test authentication scheme combined with scan obfuscation has been proposed as a countermeasure against ScanSAT attack.This work presents an attack that employs a stealthy HT to subvert the security provided by the test authentication scheme. Our analysis demonstrates that the inserted Trojan not only facilitates the execution of the ScanSAT attack but also eludes detection by the state-of-the-art Hardware Trojan detection techniques. These results highlight critical vulnerabilities in current IC security measures, emphasizing the need for resilient defenses against increasingly sophisticated attacks.