AutoLock: Automatic Design of Logic Locking with Evolutionary Computation

Logic locking protects the integrity of hardware designs throughout the integrated circuit supply chain. However, recent machine learning (ML)-based attacks have challenged its fundamental security, initiating the requirement for the design of learning-resilient locking policies. A promising ML-resilient locking mechanism hides within multiplexer-based locking. Nevertheless, recent attacks have successfully breached these state-of-the-art locking schemes, making it ever more complex to manually design policies that are resilient to all existing attacks. In this project, for the first time, we propose the automatic design exploration of logic locking with evolutionary computation (EC)—a set of versatile black-box optimization heuristics inspired by evolutionary mechanisms. The project will evaluate the performance of EC-designed logic locking against various types of attacks, starting with the latest ML-based link prediction. Additionally, the project will provide guidelines and best practices for using EC-based logic locking in practical applications.