Special Session: Novel Attacks on Logic-Locking

The outsourcing of the design and manufacturing of integrated circuits (IC) involves various untrusted entities, which can pose many security threats such as overproduction of ICs, sale of out-of-specification/rejected ICs, and piracy of Intellectual Properties (IPs). As a result, various design-for-trust techniques have been developed. Logic locking has recently gained significant interest from the research community due to its capability to provide defense against the threats from untrusted manufacturing. In logic locking, the original circuit is locked using a secret key to make it into a key-dependent circuit. However, various attacks on the extraction of secret keys associated with locking have undermined the security of logic locking techniques. Even after a decade of research, the security of logic locking is still under risk as none of the countermeasures can simultaneously provide resiliency against different attacks, such as tampering, probing, and oracle or oracle-less attacks. This paper presents an overview of novel attacks on logic locking apart from SAT-based analysis. We will present three different techniques to break a secure lock, and they are hardware Trojan based attacks, optical probing based attacks, and the ATPG oriented attacks.