The backside of modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) is becoming an open backdoor for malicious hardware attackers to take advantage of. Aided by new Failure Analysis (FA) optical techniques, e.g., Photon Emission Analysis (PEA), optical probing, and Laser Fault Injection (LFI), hackers pose a serious threat to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of sensitive information on a chip. In addition, optical backside attacks can risk semiconductor intellectual property (IP) protection mechanisms, such as logic locking. In this work, we review some of these failure analysis techniques through the lens of Optical Attack. We also review combinational and sequential Logic Locking, and then focus on corresponding state space obfuscation methodology. Attack procedures are then described on how to break into these obfuscation systems, and finally, existing countermeasures and their limitations are discussed.
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