Orthogonal obfuscation based key management for multiple IP protection

Abstract

With the development of system-on-chip (SoC) chips, more and more design houses are cooperating with each other's. How to achieve benefit sharing and key management for multiple intellectual properties (IPs) has become an emergency problem. This work proposes an orthogonal obfuscation method to protect multiple IPs. The proposed method permits cooperators to control the project using different security keys, protects the patterns with an orthogonal key, and be convenient for the user to manage the key. For reasons of increased security, the proposed method hides the original keys to prevent information leakage. Multi-port Physical Unclonable Function (MPUF) circuit is used as the additional orthogonal key to cluster membership. It protects the IPs from hardware attacks such as brute-force attack, member leakage attack, reverse engineering and so on. The security analyzes results show that the proposed method reduces the key retrieval time by 36.3% over the baseline. The proposed obfuscation methods have been successfully applied to ISCAS′89 benchmark circuits and cryptographic algorithms. Experimental results indicate that the orthogonal obfuscation only increases the area by 3.43% and consumes 2.77% more power than the baseline.