RTL Hardware IP Protection Using Key-Based Control and Data Flow Obfuscation

Recent trends of hardware intellectual property (IP) piracy and reverse engineering pose major business and se-curity concerns to an IP-based system-on-chip (SoC) de-sign flow. In this paper, we propose a Register Transfer Level (RTL) hardware IP protection technique based on low-overhead key-based obfuscation of control and data flow. The basic idea is to transform the RTL core into con-trol and data flow graph (CDFG) and then integrate a well-obfuscated finite state machine (FSM) of special structure, referred as “Mode-Control FSM”, into the CDFG in a man-ner that normal functional behavior is enabled only after application of a specific input sequence. We provide formal analysis of the effectiveness of the proposed approach and present a simple metric to quantify the level of obfuscation. We also present an integrated design flow that implements the proposed obfuscation at low computational overhead. Simulation results for two open-source IP cores show that high levels of security is achievable at nominal area and power overheads under delay constraint. 1