ABSTRACT
Hardware security issues such as integrated circuit (IC) counterfeiting, piracy, reverse engineering, and cloning have emerged as critical design considerations in the face of increasingly global approaches to IC manufacturing. From the government perspective, hardware security and trust have become even more critical given the recent loss of a true trusted fab in the United States. In the context of the proposed work, one solution to such issues is logic obfuscation [1] where key gates are strategically inserted into a logic design in order to mitigate the threat of reverse engineering. Obfuscation techniques are also important to a range of other security challenges at various328 abstraction layers. For deployable embedded systems, side-channel analysis (SCA) has been proven to be a viable tactic for attacking implementations of trustworthy encryption systems, including the Advanced Encryption Standard [2,3]. Several techniques exist where information leakage via a range of side channels (e.g., power signatures) can be obfuscated in such a way as to minimize the threat of an SCA attack [4]. Furthermore, at a high level, code obfuscation has emerged as an important technique for ensuring that code executing on a given system is not easily reverse engineered. Thus, there exists the need for obfuscation across all abstraction layers in the construction of deployable computer systems that handle sensitive data and code.
