Enhancing security of logic encryption using embedded key generation unit

摘要

Logic encryption is a popular technique to safeguard an IC design from different security vulnerabilities. However, several recently proposed attacks can extract the secret keys of an encrypted design. In this paper, we propose a new logic encryption strategy, which integrates an additional key generation unit with the design. The key generation unit takes external keys and performs a permutation of the keys to generate a highly interdependent key-set, which are applied to the inputs of the keygates. Experimentation on IWLS'05 benchmarks shows that our proposed strategy can thwart most of the existing attacks, thus enhances the security of logic encryption at the cost of reasonable design overheads.