학술논문

IOLock: An Input/Output Locking Scheme for Protection Against Reverse Engineering Attacks
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems IEEE Trans. VLSI Syst. Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on. 32(2):347-360 Feb, 2024
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Registers
Security
Pins
Hardware
Cryptography
Threat modeling
IP networks
Hardware security
IP protection
logic locking (LL)
printed circuit board (PCB) security
reverse engineering (RE)
Language
ISSN
1063-8210
1557-9999
Abstract
Reverse engineering (RE) of hardware designs poses a significant threat to the modern distributed electronics supply chain. RE can be performed at both chip and printed circuit board (PCB) levels by using structural, functional, or combined analysis techniques. Recent studies on artificial intelligence (AI)-inspired RE techniques have seen a drastic increase in the effectiveness of such attacks. While various countermeasures, e.g., logic locking (LL) at the chip level and camouflaging at the board level, have been studies to combat RE, the advent of Boolean satisfiability (SAT)-based functional query at chip level and 3-D imaging attacks at board level has shown that these protections can be easily bypassed. We observe that a common factor that contributes to the success of these attacks at both chip and board levels is the ability of an attacker to observe the input/output (I/O) patterns of a working system. Based on this observation, we present a novel locking scheme called IOLock that can effectively prevent access to golden I/O behavior of a working system. IOLock restricts access to the actual I/Os of the chips in a PCB by introducing a low-overhead key management unit (KMU) that works in conjunction with internal encryption/decryption modules near the I/O ports. The encryption/decryption modules are designed to work with the existing joint test action group (JTAG) infrastructure. IOLock can be used in standalone mode or in conjunction with another LL scheme to enhance the overall security of the design. We evaluate the security guarantees offered by IOLock theoretically, through simulation, and hardware measurements. We show that IOLock provides robust protection against both chip-level and PCB-level RE attacks while incurring minimal design overhead.