TimingCamouflage: Improving Circuit Security against Counterfeiting by Unconventional Timing
Grace Li Zhang1,a, Bing Li1,b, Bei Yu2, David Z. Pan3 and Ulf Schlichtmann1,c
1Institute for Electronic Design Automation, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany
agrace-li.zhang@tum.de
bb.li@tum.de
culf.schlichtmann
2CSE Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
byu@cse.cuhk.edu.hk
3ECE Department, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
adpan@ece.utexas.edu
ABSTRACT
With recent advances in reverse engineering, attackers can reconstruct a netlist to counterfeit chips by opening the die and scanning all layers of original chips. This relatively easy counterfeiting is made possible by the use of the standard simple clocking scheme where all combinational blocks function within one clock period. In this paper, we propose a method to invalidate the assumption that a netlist completely represents the function of a circuit. With the help of wave-pipelining paths, this method forces attackers to capture delay information from manufactured chips, which is a very challenging task because we also introduce false paths. Experimental results confirm that wave-pipelining paths and false paths can be constructed in benchmark circuits successfully with only a negligible cost, while the potential attack techniques can be thwarted.
