Notice and Invitation 

Oral Defense of Doctoral Dissertation 

The Volgenau School of Engineering, George Mason University

 

Shervin Roshanisefat

Bachelor of Science, Azad University, Iran, 2009

Master of Science, University of Tehran, Iran, 2015

 

Implementation and Assessment of Strong Logic Encryption Techniques

 

Monday July 26, 2021, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM 

Zoom Meeting Link: https://gmu.zoom.us/j/97807070569

 

All are invited to attend. 

 

Committee 

Dr. Avesta Sasan, Chair 

Dr. Kris Gaj 

Dr. Bijan Jabbari 

Dr. Liang Zhao

 

Abstract:

 

The cost of building a new semiconductor fab was estimated to be $5.0 billion in 2015, with large recurring maintenance costs, and sharply increases as technology migrates to smaller nodes. Thus, to reduce the fabrication cost, and for economic feasibility, most of the manufacturing and fabrication is pushed offshore. However, many offshore fabrication facilities are considered to be untrusted, which has raised concern over potential attacks in the manufacturing supply chain. Hence, fabrication in untrusted fabs has introduced multiple forms of security threats from supply chain including that of overproduction, Trojan insertion, reverse engineering, intellectual property theft, and counterfeiting.

 

To prevent the adversaries from such attacks, various countermeasures for hiding and/or locking the functionality of a netlist are proposed. Logic encryption is one of these methods that hides the functionality of an IP by building ambiguity or by implementing post-manufacturing means of control and programmability into a netlist. In this dissertation, I will present cycle-based logic locking for combinational circuits and deep faults locking for encrypting sequential circuits. Then, I will discuss RANE, a framework that we developed for research community to evaluate robustness of their encryption techniques against the state-of-the-art attacks.