Functional obfuscation of DSP cores used in CE devices

The previous chapter detailed many approaches for structural obfuscation but we now move forward to another class of obfuscation called “functional obfuscation.”The use of either of the techniques is the choice of design engineers. This chapter presents several methods to thwart IP piracy and RE attacks through functional obfuscation. More specifically, we will discuss IP functional locking blocks (ILBs)-based logic obfuscation for DSP cores used in CE devices as hardware hardening technique (Sengupta et al., 2018). Moreover, a PSO-based DSE is performed to generate a low-overhead, functionally obfuscated (FO) design solution for DSP cores (Sengupta and Sedaghat, 2011, 2013). The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: Section 8.2 discusses different attack scenarios and threat model. Section 8.3 explains selected functional obfuscation techniques that are available in the literature. Section 8.4 discusses the design process of functional obfuscation for DSP IP cores used in CE devices. Section 8.5 presents the security analysis of functional obfuscation methodology for DSP IP core design. Section 8.6 discusses PSO-based optimization for FO design. Section 8.7 presents analysis on case studies/test cases.