1 research outputs found
Attack of the Genes: Finding Keys and Parameters of Locked Analog ICs Using Genetic Algorithm
Hardware intellectual property (IP) theft is a major issue in today's
globalized supply chain. To address it, numerous logic locking and obfuscation
techniques have been proposed. While locking initially focused on digital
integrated circuits (ICs), there have been recent attempts to extend it to
analog ICs, which are easier to reverse engineer and to copy than digital ICs.
In this paper, we use algorithms based on evolutionary strategies to
investigate the security of analog obfuscation/locking techniques. We present a
genetic algorithm (GA) approach which is capable of completely breaking a
locked analog circuit by finding either its obfuscation key or its obfuscated
parameters. We implement both the GA attack as well as a more naive
satisfiability modulo theory (SMT)-based attack on common analog benchmark
circuits obfuscated by combinational locking and parameter biasing. We find
that GA attack can unlock all the circuits using only the locked netlist and an
unlocked chip in minutes. On the other hand, while the SMT attack converges
faster, it requires circuit specification to execute and it also returns
multiple keys that need to be brute-forced by a post-processing step. We also
discuss how the GA attack can generalize to other recent analog locking
techniques not tested in the pape