Hardware Obfuscation Pitfalls and Potential

Abstract

Globalization and outsourcing have created security risks to hardware intellectual property (IP), integrated circuits (ICs), and printed circuit boards (PCBs), which are the roots of trust in computing systems. To alleviate these risks, the academic community has turned to hardware obfuscation. In hardware obfuscation, a semiconductor IP or circuit design is transformed into one that is functionally equivalent to the original, but infeasible to re-use or reverse engineer with any reasonable amount of resources. After a decade or so of investigation, hardware obfuscation techniques have been shown to be vulnerable against various oracle, oracle-less, and physical attacks, leaving many to wonder if it has any future at all. This talk reviews these pitfalls and show how new application domains, integration with cryptographic and hardware primitives, and new ways of thinking might help hardware obfuscation reach its potential.

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