ClearLock: Deterring Hardware Reverse Engineering Attacks in a White-Box

Logic obfuscation is a popular method for safeguarding semiconductor intellectual properties from reverse engineering threats. As key recovery attacks continue to advance, the once widely accepted notion of key secrecy has become increasingly untenable. This research proposes a novel method to thwart effective reverse engineering methods even when the attacker is armed with complete control of a fully-functional netlist, i.e., in a white-box. The proposed obfuscation technique derives mutating secrets through setting up an inherently hard problem for sequential designs to lock the netlist at design time and perform self-activation at runtime. The mutating secrets render any reverse engineering shortcuts ineffective, condemning the reverse engineering attacker to full sequential analysis at an intimidating complexity. The obfuscation procedure incorporates four design transformation techniques to ensure secure activation while minimizing overhead. The practicality and security of the proposed white-box obfuscation solution are validated through experiments on MCNC benchmarks.