From Secured Logic to IP Protection

International audienceDesign and reuse has become a very common practice in the electronics design industry. IP cores are easily sold by designers to system integrators. However, several cases of counterfeiting and illegal copying have been reported and design protection techniques have been developed in response. Among these techniques, we focus on modifications at logic level aimed at active design protection. This is the first paper to provide a formal description and definition of the following techniques used to protect integrated circuits and IP cores against theft, counterfeiting, cloning and illegal copy: logic encryption, logic obfuscation, logic masking, and logic locking. In the second part of the paper, we present a new technique to insert gates in the data path of a logic circuit in order to lock it. Based on graph analysis, this method involves low overhead implementation and is more than ten thousand times faster than former fault analysis-based logic masking techniques when it comes to selecting the nodes to modify. Finally, we discuss the design requirements of a strong design protection scheme