Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Chakraborty, R.S.
• Bhunia, S.

Titel

RTL Hardware IP Protection Using Key-Based Control and Data Flow Obfuscation

Ist Teil von

• 2010 23rd International Conference on VLSI Design, 2010, p.405-410

Ort / Verlag

IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Link zum Volltext

• IEEE_Xplore

Quelle

IEEE Xplore

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Recent trends of hardware intellectual property (IP) piracy and reverse engineering pose major business and security concerns to an IP-based system-on-chip (SoC) design flow. In this paper, we propose a Register Transfer Level (RTL) hardware IP protection technique based on low-overhead key-based obfuscation of control and data flow. The basic idea is to transform the RTL core into control and data flow graph (CDFG) and then integrate a well-obfuscated finite state machine (FSM) of special structure, referred as ¿Mode-Control FSM¿, into the CDFG in a manner that normal functional behavior is enabled only after application of a specific input sequence. We provide formal analysis of the effectiveness of the proposed approach and present a simple metric to quantify the level of obfuscation. We also present an integrated design flow that implements the proposed obfuscation at low computational overhead. Simulation results for two open-source IP cores show that high levels of security is achievable at nominal area and power overheads under delay constraint.