TAO: Techniques for Algorithm-Level Obfuscation during High-Level Synthesis

Abstract

Intellectual Property (IP) theft costs semiconductor design companies billions of dollars every year. Unauthorized IP copies start from reverse engineering the given chip. Existing techniques to protect against IP theft aim to hide the IC's functionality, but focus on manipulating the HDL descriptions. We propose TAO as a comprehensive solution based on high-level synthesis to raise the abstraction level and apply algorithmic obfuscation automatically. TAO includes several transformations that make the component hard to reverse engineer during chip fabrication, while a key is later inserted to unlock the functionality. Finally, this is a promising approach to obfuscate large-scale designs despite the hardware overhead needed to implement the obfuscation. CCS CONCEPTS• Hardware → Electronic design automation; • Security and privacy → Hardware reverse engineering;

Vertical IP Protection of the Next-Generation Devices: Quo Vadis?

“…Our next steps are: • validate ASSURE on larger designs and with more structural and functional metrics and attacks. We plan to use a red team-blue team approach to create a virtuous cycle of attacks and defenses [5,9]. • include more obfuscation techniques, borrowing concepts from software obfuscation, and methods to automatically select which portions of the design to obfuscate with limited key bitstream budgets and/or overhead constraints.…”

“…However, integrating security protections must fit into the existing/established industrial design flows to avoid compromising the time-to-market and quality of the final ICs without affecting the security guarantees. For example, high-level obfuscation can be performed during highlevel synthesis but requires custom tools [5].…”

Opportunistic IP Birthmarking using Side Effects of Code Transformations on High-Level Synthesis

“…Let C be the input C code to synthesize. To create unique features unknown to the attacker, we borrow the idea of C-based obfuscation [9], [16]. We identify a set T of C-level transformations with parameters known only to the design house.…”

“…We transform the input C code with key-based control flow splitting, already used for obfuscating software code [17] and logic locking [16]. After parsing, we list all eligible basic blocks, excluding the ones with multiple exit branches.…”

Transient Key-based Obfuscation for HLS in an Untrusted Cloud Environment

“…In [7] and [8], high-level transformations are used to protect digital signal processing (DSP) circuits. In [9] and [10], keybased obfuscation is added during HLS by extending the HLS process. In these works, the goal is to obtain obfuscated RTL and to provide protection during manufacturing or for thirdparty vendors of IPs, and HLS is considered to be a trusted design step.…”