HOST: HLS Obfuscations against SMT ATtack
Chandan Karfa1,a, TM Abdul Khader1,b, Yom Nigam1,c, Ramanuj Chouksey1,d and Ramesh Karri2
1Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
ackarfa@iitg.ac.in
babdulkhader.magnetta@alumni.iitg.ac.in
cyom@alumni.iitg.ac.in
dr.chouksey@alumni.iitg.ac.in
2New York University, USA
rkarri@nyu.edu
ABSTRACT
The fab-less IC design industry is at risk of IC counterfeiting and Intellectual Property (IP) theft by untrusted third party foundries. Logic obfuscation thwarts IP theft by locking gate-level netlists using a locking key. The complexity of circuit designs and migration to high level synthesis (HLS) expands the scope of locking to a higher abstraction. Automated RTL locking during HLS integrates obfuscation into the backend HLS tool. This is tedious and requires access to the HLS tool source code. Furthermore, recent work proposed an SMT attack on HLS-based obfuscation. In this work, we propose sn RTL locking tool HOST, to thwart the SMT attack. The HOST approach is agnostic to the HLS tool. Results show that HOST obfuscations have low overhead and thwart SMT attacks.
Keywords: Register Transfer Level, High Level Synthesis, Logic Locking, RTL Locking.
