CAREER: Transformative Approaches for Hardware Obfuscation Protection, Attacks, and Assessment

电子计算硬件构成了现代信息系统和网络基础设施的基础。然而，不可信任方的参与不可避免地会插入恶意电路(即硬件特洛伊木马程序)、窃取知识产权(IP)和生产假冒产品，从而使硬件更容易受到网络攻击。国防、福利和经济增长都受到以下因素的影响：1)关键基础设施的安全和质量下降；2)知识产权所有者遭受重大经济和声誉损失；3)恐怖组织、犯罪分子和敌对国家的收入增加；4)创新和开发新产品的动力降低。本项目的目标是推进硬件混淆技术在知识产权保护方面的最新进展。硬件混淆是指将电路设计转换为在功能上与原始电路等效的电路设计，但在不付出大量努力的情况下无法进行反向工程和/或获得不受限制的使用。该项目针对与现有硬件混淆技术相关的四个主要限制：1)现实世界设计的不切实际的管理费用；2)对攻击的敏感性；3)对实际感兴趣的大型电路的可扩展性差；以及4)研究界缺乏客观比较不同方法的度量和基准。通过开发新的电路熵度量和在决策图上操作的整体模糊算法，效率和可扩展性正在得到改善。致力于混淆和认识知识产权盗版问题的外联活动包括创建第一个公开可用的基准，开展在线全球竞赛，以及编写新的课程材料、项目和书籍。通过这些活动的整合，模糊组合和顺序设计的抗攻击能力有望在项目结束时得到可测量的改善。

Electronic computing hardware forms the foundation of modern information systems and cyber infrastructure. However, the unavoidable involvement of untrusted parties who can insert malicious circuits (i.e., hardware Trojans), steal intellectual property (IP), and produce counterfeits have made hardware more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. National defense, welfare, and economic growth all suffer through 1) weaker security and quality of critical infrastructures; 2) substantial economic and reputational losses for IP owners; 3) increased revenue for terrorist groups, criminals, and adversarial nation states; and 4) lower incentive to innovate and develop new products. The objective of this project is to advance the state-of-the-art in hardware obfuscation for IP protection. Hardware obfuscation refers to transformation of a circuit design into one that is functionally equivalent to the original, but infeasible to reverse engineer and/or obtain unrestricted use without significant effort. This project targets four major limitations associated with existing hardware obfuscation techniques: 1) Impractical overheads for real-world designs; 2) Susceptibility to attacks; 3) Poor scalability to large circuits of practical interest; and 4) lack of metrics and benchmarks in the research community to objectively compare different methods. Efficiency and scalability are being improved by developing novel circuit entropy metrics and holistic obfuscation algorithms that operate on decision diagrams. Outreach activities dedicated to obfuscation and awareness of IP piracy issues include creation of the first publically available benchmarks, conducting online global competitions, and generating new course materials, projects, and book. Through integration of these activities, measureable improvements in the attack resistance of obfuscated combinational and sequential designs are expected by project's end.