Developing Attack Resilience in Y86 Processor using Logic Locking

Abstract

The majority of processors and ICs on the market today are susceptible to intellectual property theft and hardware trojan insertion. This is a significant security risk for both the manufacturer and the end user. Logic Locking is a prevalent method for tackling such problems. In Logic locking, the designer performs minor architectural modifications in the design to conceal the functionality from any malicious parties. In this paper, we have analyzed logic locking schemes like Encrypt Flip-Flop and D-MUX. These schemes have been used to encrypt a Y86-64 processor and the encrypted design was synthesized to obtain a locked netlist. To further enhance the security, a key generation module was added to the design. The key parameters such as resource utilization and hamming distance were compared for all the cases. ML-based logic locking attacks are emerging techniques for efficient key retrieval. Some of the ML-based attacks from both oracle-less and oracle-guided classes were analyzed in this study. One of the attacks which was discussed called SWEEP was implemented and tested on all the implemented encrypted designs.