Related papers: ASSURE: RTL Locking Against an Untrusted Foundry

Third-party intellectual property cores are essential building blocks of modern system-on-chip and integrated circuit designs. However, these design components usually come from vendors of different trust levels and may contain undocumented…

Layout camouflaging (LC) is a promising technique to protect chip design intellectual property (IP) from reverse engineers. Most prior art, however, cannot leverage the full potential of LC due to excessive overheads and/or their limited…

While additive manufacturing has opened interesting avenues to reimagine manufacturing as a service (MaaS) platform, transmission of design files from client to manufacturer over networks opens up many cybersecurity challenges. Securing…

Approximate circuits often achieve exceptional trade-offs between computational accuracy and hardware efficiency, making them attractive for deployment as reusable Intellectual Property (IP) cores. However, safeguarding such circuits…

Due to cost benefits, supply chains of integrated circuits (ICs) are largely outsourced nowadays. However, passing ICs through various third-party providers gives rise to many security threats, like piracy of IC intellectual property or…

Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus, a formal and rigorous…

Most chip designers outsource the manufacturing of their integrated circuits (ICs) to external foundries due to the exorbitant cost and complexity of the process. This involvement of untrustworthy, external entities opens the door to major…

The main goal of design obfuscation schemes is to protect sensitive design details from untrusted parties in the VLSI supply chain, including but not limited to off-shore foundries and untrusted end users. In this work, we provide a…

Hardware reverse engineering is a universal tool for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. On the one hand, it supports confirmation of IP infringement and detection of circuit malicious manipulations, on the other hand it provides…

The globalization of the Integrated Circuit (IC) supply chain, driven by time-to-market and cost considerations, has made ICs vulnerable to hardware Trojans (HTs). Against this threat, a promising approach is to use Machine Learning…

Semiconductor intellectual property (IP) theft incurs hundreds of billions in annual losses, driven by advanced reverse engineering (RE) techniques. Traditional ``cryptic'' IC camouflaging methods typically focus on hiding localized gate…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in generative tasks, including register-transfer level (RTL) hardware synthesis. However, their tendency to memorize training data poses critical risks when proprietary or…

Threats associated with the untrusted fabrication of integrated circuits (ICs) are numerous: piracy, overproduction, reverse engineering, hardware trojans, etc. The use of reconfigurable elements (i.e., look-up tables as in FPGAs) is a…

Intellectual Property (IP) theft is a cause of major financial and reputational damage, reportedly in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the U.S. alone. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are particularly exposed…

Protecting data in memory from attackers continues to be a concern in computing systems. CHERI is a promising approach to achieve such protection, by providing and enforcing fine-grained memory protection directly in the hardware. Creating…

Sometimes machine code turns out to be a better target for verification than source code. RISC machine code is especially advantaged with respect to source code in this regard because it has only two instructions that access memory. That…

Integrated Circuits (ICs) are the target of diverse attacks during their lifetime. Fabrication-time attacks, such as the insertion of Hardware Trojans, can give an adversary access to privileged data and/or the means to corrupt the IC's…

Many design companies have gone fabless and rely on external fabrication facilities to produce chips due to increasing cost of semiconductor manufacturing. However, not all of these facilities can be considered trustworthy; some may inject…

Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is facing infringement issues due to straightforward computations. This work, for the first time, raises a critical vulnerability of HDC, an attacker can reverse engineer the entire model, only requiring the…

Semiconductor supply chain is increasingly getting exposed to variety of security attacks such as Trojan insertion, cloning, counterfeiting, reverse engineering (RE) and piracy of Intellectual Property (IP) due to involvement of untrusted…