Sequential Logic Encryption Against Model Checking Attack
Amin Rezaei1 and Hai Zhou2
1California State University, Long Beach Long Beach, CA, USA
me@aminrezaei.com
2Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA
haizhou@northwestern.edu
ABSTRACT
Due to high IC design costs and emergence of countless untrusted foundries, logic encryption has been taken into consideration more than ever. In state-of-the-art logic encryption works, a lot of performance is sold to guarantee security against both the SAT-based and the removal attacks. However, the SAT-based attack cannot decrypt the sequential circuits if the scan chain is protected or if the unreachable states encryption is adopted. Instead, these security schemes can be defeated by the model checking attack that searches iteratively for different input sequences to put the activated IC to the desired reachable state. In this paper, we propose a practical logic encryption approach to defend against the model checking attack on sequential circuits. The robustness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by experiments on around fifty benchmarks.
Keywords: Model Checking Attack, Sequential Logic Encryption, Sequential Transformation, Sequential Encryption.
