ASSURER: A PPA-friendly Security Closure Framework for Physical Design | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

ASSURER: A PPA-friendly Security Closure Framework for Physical Design


Abstract:

Hardware security is emerging in the very large scale integration (VLSI). The seminal threats, like hardware Trojan insertion, probing attacks, and fault injection, are h...Show More

Abstract:

Hardware security is emerging in the very large scale integration (VLSI). The seminal threats, like hardware Trojan insertion, probing attacks, and fault injection, are hard to detect and almost impossi-ble to fix at post-design stage. The optimal solution is to prevent them at the physical design stage. Usually, defending against them may cause a lot of power, performance, and area (PPA) loss. In this paper, we propose a PPA-friendly physical layout security closure framework ASSURER. Reward-directed placement refinement and multi-threshold partition algorithm are proposed to assure Trojan threats are empty. Cleaning up probing attacks is established on a patch-based ECO routing flow. Evaluated on the ISPD'22 bench-marks, ASSURER can clean out the Trojan threat with no leakage power increase when shrinking the physical layout area. When not shrinking, ASSURER only increases 14% total power. Compared with the work of first place in the ISPD2022 Contest, ASSURE reduced 53% additional total power consumption, and probing vulnerability can be reduced by 97.6% under the premise of timing closure. We believe this work shall open up a new perspective for preventing Trojan insertion and probing attacks.
Date of Conference: 16-19 January 2023
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 23 February 2023
Electronic ISBN:978-1-4503-9783-4

ISSN Information:

Conference Location: Tokyo, Japan

1 Introduction

Various and serious hardware threats are emerging throughout the lifecycle of integrated circuits (ICs). Many seminal threats are ex-ecuted post-design stage, which we can not ensure security once the physical design is done. For example, there is no way to ensure that the layout has not been inserted by hardware Trojan and other unknown threats after the manufacturing is completed [12]. Simi-larly, we can not prevent probing attacks that can access, monitor, and extract sensitive information at the running time of a chip [9]. However, electronic design automation (EDA) tools traditionally optimize PPA, and there is currently little to no experience related to designing secure ICs available within the EDA community [4].

Contact IEEE to Subscribe

References

References is not available for this document.