OASIS: A Layered IP Protection Framework for Structured ASIC

Rasheed Almawzan, Reiner Dizon-Paradis, Aritra Dasgupta, Dipal Halder, Md Moshiur Rahman, Maneesh Merugu, Kostas Amberiadis, Sandip Ray, Swarup Bhunia
January, 2023
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Abstract

Due to globalization and inexpensive labor, electronics companies are heavily relying on third-party sources for most of the fabrication process, including new technologies like structured ASIC. Consequently, IP designers have considered a zero-trust model, where the attacker is assumed to have access to IP design at any stage. However, the existing body of work has not addressed shortcomings in structured ASIC and is only designed against a small subset of attack surfaces. In this work, we propose a multi-layered approach for protecting confidentiality and integrity attacks using a synergistic combination of countermeasures over two abstraction levels to address this issue in structured ASIC. The shortcoming of any countermeasure is rectified by the other security mechanisms in the proposed approach. The layered approach in the proposed approach also makes the implementation suitable for structured ASIC, where the unused resources in configurable logic blocks are utilized to minimize overhead costs.

Type
Manuscript
Hardware ip protection Programmable logic Structured asic Reverse engineering Ip confidentiality
Reiner Dizon-Paradis
Reiner Dizon-Paradis
Postdoctoral Research Associate

My research interests include machine learning applications in national security, hardware security and assurance, artificial intelligence of Things, and robotics.