arXiv subjects

Muhammad Yasin

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad Yasin.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

CAC 2.0: A Corrupt and Correct Logic Locking Technique Resilient to Structural Analysis Attacks

Logic locking proposed to protect integrated circuits from serious hardware threats has been studied extensively over a decade. In these years, many efficient logic locking techniques have been proven to be broken. The state-of-the-art logic locking techniques, including the prominent corrupt and correct (CAC) technique, are resilient to satisfiability (SAT)-based and removal attacks, but vulnerable to structural analysis attacks. To overcome this drawback, this paper introduces an improved version of CAC, called CAC 2.0, which increases the search space of structural analysis attacks using obfuscation. To do so, CAC 2.0 locks the original circuit twice, one after another, on different nodes with different number of protected primary inputs using CAC, while hiding original protected primary inputs among decoy primary inputs. This paper also introduces an open source logic locking tool, called HIID, equipped with well-known techniques including CAC 2.0. Our experiments show that CAC 2.0 is resilient to existing SAT-based, removal, and structural analysis attacks. To achieve this, it increases the number of key inputs at most 4x and the gate-level area between 30.2% and 0.8% on circuits with low and high complexity with respect to CAC.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

KRATT: QBF-Assisted Removal and Structural Analysis Attack Against Logic Locking

This paper introduces KRATT, a removal and structural analysis attack against state-of-the-art logic locking techniques, such as single and double flip locking techniques (SFLTs and DFLTs). KRATT utilizes powerful quantified Boolean formulas (QBFs), which have not found widespread use in hardware security, to find the secret key of SFLTs for the first time. It can handle locked circuits under both oracle-less (OL) and oracle-guided (OG) threat models. It modifies the locked circuit and uses a prominent OL attack to make a strong guess under the OL threat model. It uses a structural analysis technique to identify promising protected input patterns and explores them using the oracle under the OG model. Experimental results on ISCAS'85, ITC'99, and HeLLO: CTF'22 benchmarks show that KRATT can break SFLTs using a QBF formulation in less than a minute, can decipher a large number of key inputs of SFLTs and DFLTs with high accuracy under the OL threat model, and can easily find the secret key of DFLTs under the OG threat model. It is shown that KRATT outperforms publicly available OL and OG attacks in terms of solution quality and run-time.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Benchmarking at the Frontier of Hardware Security: Lessons from Logic Locking

Integrated circuits (ICs) are the foundation of all computing systems. They comprise high-value hardware intellectual property (IP) that are at risk of piracy, reverse-engineering, and modifications while making their way through the geographically-distributed IC supply chain. On the frontier of hardware security are various design-for-trust techniques that claim to protect designs from untrusted entities across the design flow. Logic locking is one technique that promises protection from the gamut of threats in IC manufacturing. In this work, we perform a critical review of logic locking techniques in the literature, and expose several shortcomings. Taking inspiration from other cybersecurity competitions, we devise a community-led benchmarking exercise to address the evaluation deficiencies. In reflecting on this process, we shed new light on deficiencies in evaluation of logic locking and reveal important future directions. The lessons learned can guide future endeavors in other areas of hardware security.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

ScanSAT: Unlocking Static and Dynamic Scan Obfuscation

While financially advantageous, outsourcing key steps, such as testing, to potentially untrusted Outsourced Assembly and Test (OSAT) companies may pose a risk of compromising on-chip assets. Obfuscation of scan chains is a technique that hides the actual scan data from the untrusted testers; logic inserted between the scan cells, driven by a secret key, hides the transformation functions that map the scan-in stimulus (scan-out response) and the delivered scan pattern (captured response). While static scan obfuscation utilizes the same secret key, and thus, the same secret transformation functions throughout the lifetime of the chip, dynamic scan obfuscation updates the key periodically. In this paper, we propose ScanSAT: an attack that transforms a scan obfuscated circuit to its logic-locked version and applies the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) based attack, thereby extracting the secret key. We implement our attack, apply on representative scan obfuscation techniques, and show that ScanSAT can break both static and dynamic scan obfuscation schemes with 100% success rate. Moreover, ScanSAT is effective even for large key sizes and in the presence of scan compression.

cs.CR↗