Reversible Circuits: IC/IP Piracy Attacks and Countermeasures
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Reversible circuits employ a computing paradigm
which is useful in a broad variety of applications. With increasing
interest, also security concerns for those circuits will raise in the
near future. At first glance, reversible circuits seem to be more
secure to IC/IP piracy than conventional circuits since the target
function is usually embedded in the reversible backbone circuit.
This embedding adds ancillary inputs and garbage outputs that
may appear to hide the target function. However, recent work
showed that target function embedding and reversible synthesis
methods leave telltale signs in the reversible circuits which
allow for an easy extraction of the synthesis approach and
the embedded circuit. In this paper, we perform an analysis
of the IC/IP piracy attacks on reversible circuits. We focus
on reversible circuits generated using QMDD- and BDD-based
synthesis approaches as case studies. We show that most of the
target function can be identified using the telltale signs of the
synthesis approach. We then propose a cost-effective input/output
scrambling scheme that wipes out these telltale signs, and thus,
thwarts the considered attacks by adding reversible gates. Those
additional gates yield efficient yet secure reversible circuits.
Sprache der Kurzfassung:
Englisch
Journal:
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems