Cute-Lock: Behavioral and Structural Multi-Key Logic Locking Using Time Base Keys

2025-01-29

AI Summary

To address intellectual property (IP) piracy and overproduction risks in outsourced manufacturing—particularly vulnerabilities of conventional single-key logic locking to oracle-guided, removal, and data-flow attacks—this paper proposes Cute-Lock, the first multi-key logic locking scheme leveraging time-sensitive keys. Cute-Lock innovatively integrates collaborative locking at both RTL behavioral and gate-level netlist structural abstractions. It employs a multi-stage key distribution protocol coupled with a time-based key generation mechanism to establish dual-layer security. Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate that Cute-Lock completely blocks all major attack vectors. Crucially, it achieves this without incurring any area or power overhead, thereby significantly outperforming state-of-the-art logic locking approaches in security efficacy.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Logic Programming
• Machine Learning: Statistical Relational/Logic Learning

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

The outsourcing of semiconductor manufacturing raises security risks, such as piracy and overproduction of hardware intellectual property. To overcome this challenge, logic locking has emerged to lock a given circuit using additional key bits. While single-key logic locking approaches have demonstrated serious vulnerability to a wide range of attacks, multi-key solutions, if carefully designed, can provide a reliable defense against not only oracle-guided logic attacks, but also removal and dataflow attacks. In this paper, using time base keys, we propose, implement and evaluate a family of secure multi-key logic locking algorithms called Cute-Lock that can be applied both in RTL-level behavioral and netlist-level structural representations of sequential circuits. Our extensive experimental results under a diverse range of attacks confirm that, compared to vulnerable state-of-the-art methods, employing the Cute-Lock family drives attacking attempts to a dead end without additional overhead.

Problem

• Semiconductor Chip Security
• Intellectual Property Theft
• Unauthorized Replication

Innovation

• Cute-Lock
• Time-dependent Cryptography
• Multi-key Logic Locking