Front-end-of-line attacks in split manufacturing

摘要

By splitting the manufacturing of integrated circuits into back-end-of-line (BEOL) and front-end-of-line (FEOL) at different foundries, the vulnerabilities to attacks by a untrusted foundry is considerably alleviated. Most previous works focus on the scenario of only BEOL attacks at untrusted FEOL foundries. In this work, we study a largely unexplored scenario, where FEOL attacks are launched by an untrusted BEOL foundry. A geometric pattern match attack and a machine learningbased attack technique are investigated. Defense techniques against the FEOL attacks are also discussed. The effectiveness of these techniques is demonstrated by experiments on benchmark circuits.