Abstract
Logic obfuscation has evolved as a promising countermeasure against IP piracy. The Finite State Machine (FSM) is often obfuscated in a sequential circuit using suitable strategies. One such strategy proposed to obfuscate each state transition of the FSM using a class of non-group additive cellular automata (CA) called \(D1\,*\,CA\) and \(D1\,*\,CA_{dual}\). This CA-based obfuscation strategy conceals the FSM states, providing high testability hence eliminating the requirement of any scan-based Design-for-Testability techniques. However, utilizing the information leaked by the implemented FSM observable externally, an end-to-end attack strategy (named ORACALL) was proposed. It could extract the secret key for each transition of the CA-based obfuscated FSM along with the CA state encodings of the FSM states. In this work, we investigate the root cause of the success of ORACALL on a CA-based obfuscation strategy. Utilizing those findings, we propose a couple of mitigation techniques by appending non-linearity to the existing CA structure along with a slight modification of the \(D1\,*\,CA\) rule vector. Experimental validation proves that these simple yet effective countermeasures could thwart ORACALL while preserving the elegance of the underlying structure of the CA-based obfuscation technique with minimal overhead.
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Notes
- 1.
depth here is the minimum number of state transitions required from an unreachable state to reach the cyclic state
- 2.
Class (a, b, c) infers that the S-Box equation comprises of a cubic terms, b quadratic terms, and c linear terms, respectively.
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Saha, A., Banerjee, H., Chakraborty, R.S., Mukhopadhyay, D. (2022). Revisiting Logic Obfuscation Using Cellular Automata. In: Das, S., Martinez, G.J. (eds) Proceedings of First Asian Symposium on Cellular Automata Technology. ASCAT 2022. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1425. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0542-1_3
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