GNNUnlock: Graph Neural Networks-based Oracle-less Unlocking Scheme for Provably Secure Logic Locking
This work presents a significant security vulnerability for hardware designers and manufacturers relying on provably secure logic locking, as it demonstrates a highly effective attack against these protection mechanisms.
This paper introduces GNNUnlock, a novel oracle-less machine learning attack that uses graph neural networks to identify and remove protection logic in locked netlists. GNNUnlock achieves 99.24%-100% success in breaking various provably secure logic locking schemes, with a post-processing step enhancing detection accuracy to 100% for all tested benchmarks.
In this paper, we propose GNNUnlock, the first-of-its-kind oracle-less machine learning-based attack on provably secure logic locking that can identify any desired protection logic without focusing on a specific syntactic topology. The key is to leverage a well-trained graph neural network (GNN) to identify all the gates in a given locked netlist that belong to the targeted protection logic, without requiring an oracle. This approach fits perfectly with the targeted problem since a circuit is a graph with an inherent structure and the protection logic is a sub-graph of nodes (gates) with specific and common characteristics. GNNs are powerful in capturing the nodes' neighborhood properties, facilitating the detection of the protection logic. To rectify any misclassifications induced by the GNN, we additionally propose a connectivity analysis-based post-processing algorithm to successfully remove the predicted protection logic, thereby retrieving the original design. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that GNNUnlock is 99.24%-100% successful in breaking various benchmarks locked using stripped-functionality logic locking, tenacious and traceless logic locking, and Anti-SAT. Our proposed post-processing enhances the detection accuracy, reaching 100% for all of our tested locked benchmarks. Analysis of the results corroborates that GNNUnlock is powerful enough to break the considered schemes under different parameters, synthesis settings, and technology nodes. The evaluation further shows that GNNUnlock successfully breaks corner cases where even the most advanced state-of-the-art attacks fail.