An overview of hardware intellectual property protection

Over the last fifteen years, a plethora of techniques has been developed to protect the hardware from piracy attacks from different sets of attackers in the supply chain — untrusted foundry, untrusted user, untrusted testing facility, or a combination thereof. This article explains their threat model(s), capabilities, and limitations. It also highlights several approaches that are developed to incorporate these techniques in conventional logic designs. Finally, the article explains provably-secure IP protection techniques and outline the challenges involved in making those technique practical.