CAREER: Parameter Obfuscation: A Novel Methodology for the Protection of Analog Intellectual Property

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Hardware security, specifically the protection of integrated circuit intellectual property (IP), has gained importance as adversaries have the financial and experiential means to reverse engineer and replicate competitors' IP. Significant research effort has been devoted to protecting digital circuits, but the protection of analog circuits from an adversary has largely been ignored. The focus of this work is to explore techniques to enhance the security of analog circuits from attacks such as reverse engineering and cloning, both of which can lead to IP theft. Analog parameter obfuscation is proposed as a means to protect analog circuits from adversarial theft. The large design space for analog parameter obfuscation, which includes biasing conditions, gains, bandwidths, noise figure, quality factors, center frequency, phase noise, and many more, provides a means to mask analog circuit functionality beyond the simple binary functional logic locking that has been developed for digital circuits. To enhance the security of analog circuits from reverse engineering, the proposed research includes 1) the development of novel parameter-based obfuscation techniques for analog circuits, 2) the development of algorithms and methodologies to select and prune analog circuit parameters (gain, biasing points, bandwidth, noise figure, quality factor, phase noise, etc.) best suited for obfuscation, 3) the development of initial metrics for the evaluation of parameter obfuscation techniques, and 4) the implementation of the obfuscation technique on a superheterodyne receiver for experimental verification and algorithm refinement. The fundamental outcome is to develop a systematic approach to analyze and obfuscate analog circuit parameters that are multi-dimensional and continuous by nature. The research results will be used to expose high school students to engineering topics through presentations and hands-on workshops. In addition, high school students will be mentored in research through an outreach program, initiated and led by the investigator, which pairs students with faculty mentors. The data generated from the project will be maintained online on a server at Drexel University (http://ice.ece.drexel.edu) - with the exception of publications, for which copyright is transferred to a professional organization (such as IEEE or ACM) and which maintain their own repository. At the completion of the project, all data and code will be released in the public domain and maintained in the repository for at least the required period set by agency and university guidelines.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.