Toward Efficient Evaluation of Logic Encryption Schemes: Models and Metrics
This work addresses the problem of inconsistent evaluation methods for logic encryption in hardware security, providing a standardized framework for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques.
The paper tackles the lack of uniform metrics and models for evaluating logic encryption schemes, proposing a general model and uniform metrics that enable fast and accurate assessment of security trade-offs, achieving at least 2X smaller average prediction errors than previous approaches.
Research in logic encryption over the last decade has resulted in various techniques to prevent different security threats such as Trojan insertion, intellectual property leakage, and reverse engineering. However, there is little agreement on a uniform set of metrics and models to efficiently assess the achieved security level and the trade-offs between security and overhead. This paper addresses the above challenges by relying on a general logic encryption model that can encompass all the existing techniques, and a uniform set of metrics that can capture multiple, possibly conflicting, security concerns. We apply our modeling approach to four state-of-the-art encryption techniques, showing that it enables fast and accurate evaluation of design trade-offs, average prediction errors that are at least 2X smaller than previous approaches, and the evaluation of compound encryption methods.