ECE Seminar

Hadi Mardani Kamali

“The Evolution of Logic Locking: Towards Intercorrelated Logic and Routing Locking”

Monday, May 10, 2021 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Zoom Webinar Link: https://gmu.zoom.us/j/96863146294

Advisor: Dr. Avesta Sasan

Abstract:

Logic obfuscation, a.k.a. logic locking, is a proactive Design-for-Trust (DfTr) technique that aims to address the important security concerns in the IC supply chain and combats the existing security threats and trust challenges. Logic locking is the ability to add limited post-manufacturing programmability into the IC to conceal the IC’s functionality from the source of vulnerabilities, such as untrusted stakeholders. However, over the years, the reliability and trustworthiness of logic locking have been seriously challenged by different de-obfuscation attacks. In this seminar, after elaborating the current state of logic locking in the literature, we aim to open a new direction as a means of logic locking that provides much higher robustness. Unlike almost all previous logic locking solutions that rely on XOR-based locking focusing on the logic functions, we will investigate and evaluate MUX-based logic locking techniques that add ambiguity to the routing of the wires within an IC. We will introduce two routing-based (MUX-based) logic locking techniques, and with a comprehensive comparison with the state-of-the-art logic locking techniques, we will evaluate them in terms of security (resiliency against the attacks), as well as the implementation effort and overhead.