Hardware-Efficient Compound IC Protection with Lightweight Cryptography

2026-04-13

AI Summary

This work addresses critical security threats in globalized IC manufacturing—such as overproduction and piracy—and overcomes limitations of existing cryptographic protection schemes, which often incur high hardware overhead and remain vulnerable to removal and power analysis attacks. The paper proposes an integrated protection mechanism that synergistically combines lightweight cryptography, logic locking, and hardware obfuscation. For the first time, these three techniques are deeply fused within a provably secure framework, achieving significantly reduced hardware overhead while demonstrating strong robustness against removal attacks, algebraic attacks, and logic-locking-specific adversaries. The overall hardware complexity of the proposed approach is markedly lower than that of state-of-the-art cryptographic-based methods.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Applications of cryptography
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

Over the years, many techniques have been introduced to protect integrated circuits (ICs) from hardware security threats that emerged in the globalized IC manufacturing supply chain, such as overproduction and piracy. However, most of these techniques have been rendered inefficient since they do not rely on provably secure algorithms. Moreover, the previously proposed techniques using cryptography algorithms lead to a significant increase in hardware complexity and are vulnerable to the removal and power analysis attacks. In this paper, we propose a compound IC protection mechanism that uses a lightweight cryptography algorithm with prominent logic locking and hardware obfuscation techniques. Experimental results show that the secure designs generated by the developed tool have significantly less hardware complexity when compared to those generated by previously proposed techniques using cryptography algorithms and are resilient to existing removal, algebraic, and logic locking attacks.

Problem

• hardware security
• integrated circuits
• lightweight cryptography
• logic locking
• hardware obfuscation

Innovation

• lightweight cryptography
• logic locking
• hardware obfuscation
• compound IC protection
• hardware-efficient security