A Novel Approach To IP Protection Using Automated Hardware Level Techniques To Secure A Design

The functionality of digital chips can be readily reverse engineered using mask data. This could potentially allow an attacker to insert Trojans into a design that would not be detected through normal test procedures. In this research, a tool is developed to significantly complicate reverse engineering by inserting low-overhead cryptography features into the chip through Finite StateMachines. Several preliminary implementations of the proposed defense mechanism have been implemented. The resulting designs were analyzed for weaknesses by a 3rd party red-team, and the results were used to improve subsequent iterations.;In the final implementation, a desire to guard against the weaknesses identified in all previous implementations was a key driver in the design. The final implementation has been described in detail. A scalable hash function has been presented which minimizes impact to clock frequency being only 2-gates in depth. The overhead of the cryptoFSM mechanism was measured on the LC3 design. While significant overhead was measured, further analysis shows the scalability of cryptoFSM to designs that are realistic in size to one that might get fabricated today. It is shown, that on the AMD Tahiti GPU for instance, the overhead of cryptoFSM is theorized to be less than 0.1%. A measure of state machine complexity known as Cyclomatic Complexity is used to show complexity increase observed due to cryptoFSM. Over all keys, it is shown that complexity can increase 18.61x for the LC3 implementation.;The inability of the design to be reverse engineered has been shown using a hierarchical netlist as the starting information available to the attacker. An attack-tree centered approach to reverse engineering the final design has been documented in detail. The end results and complete picture of the state machine visible to the attacker is presented. The inability of the attacker to determine the proper state machine sequence has been shown.