Warm Up before Circuit De-obfuscation? An Exploration through Bounded-Model-Checkers

With the emergence of numerous circuit de-obfuscation attacks, the strength of logic locking has been jeopardized in recent years. Amongst them, bounded-model-checker (BMC)-based attack on locked circuits with limited design-for-testability (DFT) access received significant attention in recent years. However, scalability is a crucial challenge in such an attack due to having two unrolling factors, namely sequential unrolling and miter duplication. This paper will explore some techniques for warming up the BMC before its main invocation to expedite the attack procedure. Our experimental results reflect that the efficacy of BMC-based attacks can be enhanced once the BM C is initiated meticulously through the studied methodologies.