Turning Electronic Circuits Features into On-Chip Locks

International audienceIn order to fight against counterfeiting and illegal copying of integrated circuits (ICs) and intellectual property (IP) cores, several design data protection schemes have been proposed. One of the key components of such schemes is the one in charge of locking the circuit in case it has been illegally obtained. This is necessary in order to make illegal copies useless. In this chapter, we show that common features, found in most electronic devices, can be turned into on-chip locks. First of all, we identify these features and then show how they can be modify to lock the design. The main point to use existing features is to induce low overhead, which is very interesting for designers. We implemented the proof of concept of the described locks in FPGAs, and present resources overhead for the implementation of them on two reference designs. We also give details on partial locking, which can be used to provide the design in evaluation mode