Privacy Protection of VLSI Circuits through High Level Transformation Based Obfuscation

For any semiconductor manufacturing requires greater capital investments, the use of contract foundries has grown dramatically, increasing exposure to theft and unauthorized excess production. Many recent activities proved that IC piracy has now become a major challenge for the electronics and defense industries. In this paper we presents a novel approach to design obfuscated circuits for digital signal processing (DSP) applications using high-level transformations, a key-based obfuscating finite-state machine (FSM), and a reconfiguration. The goal is to design DSP circuits that are harder to reverse engineer. With several modes of operations for obfuscation where the outputs are meaningful from a signal processing point of view, but are functionally incorrect for better confusion. The configure data controls various modes of the circuit operation and Functional obfuscation is accomplished with the use of the correct initialization key. Structural obfuscation is also achieved by the proposed methodology via high-level transformations. The efficiency of proposed methodology is verified with FIR design, strong high level obfuscation is proved and analyzed for various key sizes.