TroScan: Enhancing On-Chip Delivery Resilience to Physical Attack Through Frequency-Triggered Key Generation

Keys grant access to devices and are the core secrets in logic obfuscation. Typically, keys are stored in tamper-proof memory and are subsequently delivered to logic locking modules through scan chains. However, recent physical attacks have successfully extracted keys directly from registers, challenging the security of the prior scan obfuscation/blocking efforts. This paper mitigates the threat of direct value extraction by proposing TroScan, an architecture that leverages the internal frequency of register chains to activate trigger circuits. We propose three key generation methods for typical defense scenarios and gate-aware obfuscation optimization. To the authors' best knowledge, this work presents the first on-chip key delivery obfuscation architecture against Electro-Optical Frequency Mapping (EOFM) attacks. Evaluation shows ~100% key obfuscation effectiveness under two EOFM attack targets. For overheads, we demonstrate the worst-case fault coverage rate of 97.6%, average area/power overheads of 7.5%/11.8%, and an average key generation success rate of 98% across 80 process voltage temperature (PVT) conditions.