Protecting DSP Kernels Using Robust Hologram-Based Obfuscation

Digital signal processing (DSP) kernels-based intellectual property cores are important components of modern consumer electronics. However, hardware threats such as reverse engineering and Trojan insertion have raised serious concerns about the protection of DSP kernels. Structural obfuscation is one of the protection mechanisms that make DSP design architecture un-obvious to interpret, thereby making it harder to reverse engineer. A novel methodology is presented in this paper called “hologram-based structural obfuscation” for protection of DSP kernels. The proposed hologram-based obfuscation integrates two DSP kernel architectures in a camouflaged fashion without change of functionality of each DSP kernel, such that it becomes complex and un-interpretable to an adversary. This approach of simultaneous protection of two DSP kernels via hologram obfuscation is presented first time in the literature. We propose multiple robust obfuscation algorithms in this paper to design hologram-based obfuscated designs and demonstrate using popular DSP kernels. Proposed approach is compared with a recent work on protecting DSP kernels and experimental results indicate that proposed approach yields significantly lesser area and stronger obfuscation. Results of proposed obfuscation on DSP kernels achieve approximately 33.5% reduction in gate count and ~14 times stronger obfuscation than recent work.