Efficient design and analysis of secure CMOS logic through logic encryption

Abstract

Untrusted third parties and untrustworthy foundries highlighted the significance of hardware security in the present-day world. Because of the globalization of integrated circuit (IC) design flow in the semiconductor industry, hardware security issues must be taken to prevent intellectual property (IP) piracy. Logic encryption is an efficient method to protect circuits from IP piracy, reverse engineering, and malicious tampering of IC for Trojan insertion. Researchers have proposed many logic encryption methods, which lead to overhead in circuit design parameters such as area, power, and performance. This paper aims to bring a trade-off between these parameters, with security being the main key factor, and ensure the design metrics by proposing a novel transistor-level method of logic encryption for CMOS gates. Experimental results show that, on the usage of proposed encrypted key gates, the design overheads such as area, power, delay, and energy are reduced by an average of 42.94%, 37.37%, 26.79%, and 50.96%, respectively, over the existing logic encryption-based topologies.