Games, Dollars, Splits: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Split Manufacturing

Split manufacturing has been proposed as a defense to prevent threats like intellectual property (IP) piracy and illegal overproduction of integrated circuits (ICs). Over the last few years, researchers have developed a plethora of attack and defense techniques, creating a cat-and-mouse game between defending designers and attacking foundries. In this paper, we take an orthogonal approach to this ongoing research in split manufacturing; rather than developing an attack or a defense technique, we propose a means to analyze different attack and defense techniques. To that end, we develop a game-theoretic framework that helps researchers evaluate their new and existing attack and defense techniques. We model two attack scenarios using two different types of games and obtain the optimal defense strategies. We perform extensive simulations with our proposed framework, using nine different attacks and a class of placement and routing-based defense techniques on various benchmarks to gain deeper insights into split manufacturing. For instance, our framework indicates that the optimal defense techniques in the two attack scenarios are the same. Moreover, larger benchmarks are secure by naïve split manufacturing and do not require any additional defense technique under our cost model and considered attacks. We also uncover a counter-intuitive finding—an attacker using the network-flow attack should not use all the hints; instead, she should use only a subset.