IOLock: An Input/Output Locking Scheme for Protection Against Reverse Engineering Attacks

Reverse engineering (RE) of hardware designs poses a significant threat to the modern distributed electronics supply chain. RE can be performed at both chip and printed circuit board (PCB) levels by using structural, functional, or combined analysis techniques. Recent studies on artificial intelligence (AI)-inspired RE techniques have seen a drastic increase in the effectiveness of such attacks. While various countermeasures, e.g., logic locking (LL) at the chip level and camouflaging at the board level, have been studies to combat RE, the advent of Boolean satisfiability (SAT)-based functional query at chip level and 3-D imaging attacks at board level has shown that these protections can be easily bypassed. We observe that a common factor that contributes to the success of these attacks at both chip and board levels is the ability of an attacker to observe the input/output (I/O) patterns of a working system. Based on this observation, we present a novel locking scheme called
IOLock
that can effectively prevent access to golden I/O behavior of a working system.
IOLock
restricts access to the actual I/Os of the chips in a PCB by introducing a low-overhead key management unit (KMU) that works in conjunction with internal encryption/decryption modules near the I/O ports. The encryption/decryption modules are designed to work with the existing joint test action group (JTAG) infrastructure.
IOLock
can be used in standalone mode or in conjunction with another LL scheme to enhance the overall security of the design. We evaluate the security guarantees offered by
IOLock
theoretically, through simulation, and hardware measurements. We show that
IOLock
provides robust protection against both chip-level and PCB-level RE attacks while incurring minimal design overhead.