Golden Reference Library Matching of Structural Checking for securing soft IPs

Hardware IP Classification through Weighted Characteristics

“…Unlike internal assets, all external assets must be manually assigned to each primary port signal through the use of the Structural Checking tool. These assets are broken up into 5 Figure 1 illustrates asset assignment to a simple ALU prior to asset filtering. In the diagram input "A" contains data from some type of memory which is why it is assigned a DATA_MEMORY asset.…”

“…Resulting from the work done in [5], an asset pattern, which is written out to an asset file, is a compilation of all asset traces of a soft IP. Asset traces are created for every port/internal signal in a design and contain all assets assigned to it.…”

“…Based on the best percent match of the unknown IP against the Golden Reference entries, Golden Reference Matching can provide a probabilistic result on whether or not the unknown design contains a hardware Trojan and determine the overall functionality of the design. Developed in [5], the SC tool uses a Golden Reference Library, which contains a list of known Trojan free and Trojan infested IPs. Table 1 provides a simple example of the matching process.…”

“…In [5] the idea of partial matching was added to the Structural Checking tool's matching algorithm. Partial matching involved applying a 50% match between assets that were not identical but shared a similar purpose in a design.…”