ResiLogic: Leveraging Composability and Diversity to Design Fault and Intrusion Resilient Chips

Abstract

A long-standing challenge is the design of chips resilient to faults and glitches. Both fine-grained gate diversity and coarse-grained modular redundancy have been used in the past. However, these approaches have not been well-studied under other threat models where some stakeholders in the supply chain are untrusted. Increasing digital sovereignty tensions raise concerns regarding the use of foreign off-the-shelf tools and intellectual property (IP), or off-sourcing fabrication, driving research into the design of resilient chips under this threat model. This article addresses a threat model considering three pertinent attacks to resilience: distribution, zonal, and compound attacks. To mitigate these attacks, we introduce the ResiLogic framework that exploits Diversity by Composability: constructing diverse circuits composed of smaller diverse ones by design. This approach enables designers to develop circuits in the early stages of design without the need for additional redundancy in terms of space or cost. To generate diverse circuits, we propose a technique using E-Graphs with new rewrite definitions for diversity. Using this approach at different levels of granularity is shown to improve the resilience of circuit design in ResiLogic up to $\times 5$ against the three considered attacks.