DE2: SAT-Based Sequential Logic Decryption with a Functional Description

You Li, Guannan Zhao, Yunqi He, Hai Zhou

Abstract: Logic locking is a promising approach to protect the intellectual properties of integrated circuits. Existing logic locking schemes assume that an adversary must possess a cycle-accurate oracle circuit to launch an I/O attack. This paper presents DE2, a novel and rigorous attacking algorithm based on a new adversarial model. DE2 only takes a high-level functional specification of the victim chip. Such specifications are increasingly prevalent in the modern IC design flow. DE2 closes the timing gap between the specification and the circuit with an automatic alignment mechanism, which enables effective logic decryption without cycle-accurate information. An essential enabler of DE2 is a synthesis-based sequential logic decryption algorithm called LIM, which introduces only a minimal overhead in every iteration. Experiments show that DE2 can efficiently attack logic-locked benchmarks without access to a cycle-accurate oracle circuit. Besides, LIM can solve 20% more ISCAS'89 benchmarks than state-of-the-art sequential logic decryption algorithms.