LOKI: A Secure FPGA Prototyping of IoT IP with Lightweight Logic Locking

Logic locking techniques have emerged as a promising approach to mitigate IP theft, counterfeiting, malicious modifications, reverse engineering threats, etc. This research paper investigates the application of LOcked Key Insertion (LOKI)-based secure IoT hardware IP/IC design, focusing on implementing the GIFT cipher as a representative hardware IP. The LOKI technique embeds a secret on-chip hardware key into the design, enabling secure encryption and decryption. The experimental analysis demonstrates that only the correct on-chip hardware key ensures accurate encryption and decryption, while an incorrect key leads to malfunctioning outputs. For quantitative and qualitative research, image encryption illustrates the security provided by logic locking. The results highlight the efficacy of LOKI-based design to enhance IoT hardware IP/IC security. The integration of the LOKI technique comes at the cost of 2.63% to 5.76% resource overhead computed in terms of FPGA slices. In particular, power consumption remains constant, ensuring the resilience of the system. Furthermore, image-based analysis demonstrates improved results with the use of LOKI.