Exploiting Spin-Orbit Torque Devices as Reconfigurable Logic for Circuit Obfuscation
This addresses security for chip designers by making reverse engineering exponentially harder, though it is an incremental improvement using emerging devices.
The paper tackles circuit obfuscation to prevent reverse engineering attacks by using spin-orbit torque devices as reconfigurable logic, reducing area overhead by 10% on average in experiments.
Circuit obfuscation is a frequently used approach to conceal logic functionalities in order to prevent reverse engineering attacks on fabricated chips. Efficient obfuscation implementations are expected with lower design complexity and overhead but higher attack difficulties. In this paper, an emerging obfuscation approach is proposed by leveraging spinorbit torque (SOT) devices based look-up-tables (LUTs) as reconfigurable logic to replace the carefully selected gates. It is essentially impossible to identify the obfuscated gate with SOTs inside according to the physical geometry characteristics because the configured functionalities are represented by magnetization states. Such an obfuscation approach makes the circuit security further improved with high exponential attack complexities. Experiments on MCNC and ISCAS 85/89 benchmark suits show that the proposed approach could reduce the area overheads due to obfuscation by 10% averagely.