Programmable Gates Using Hybrid CMOS-STT Design to Prevent IC Reverse Engineering

This paper presents a rigorous step towards design-for-assurance by introducing a new class of logically reconfigurable design resilient to design reverse engineering. Based on the non-volatile spin transfer torque (STT) magnetic technology, we introduce a basic set of non-volatile reconfigurable Look-Up-Table (LUT) logic components (NV-STT-based LUTs). STT-based LUT with significantly different set of characteristics compared to CMOS provides new opportunities to enhance design security yet makes it challenging to remain highly competitive with custom CMOS or even SRAM-based LUT in terms of power, performance and area. To address these challenges, we propose several algorithms to select and replace custom CMOS gates with reconfigurable STT-based LUTs during design implementation such that the functionality of STT-based components and therefore the entire design cannot be determined in any manageable time, rendering any design reverse engineering attack ineffective. Our study conducted on a large number of standard circuit benchmarks concludes significant resiliency of hybrid STT-CMOS circuits against various types of attacks. Furthermore, the selection algorithms on average have a small impact on the performance of the circuit. We also tested these techniques against satisfiability attacks developed recently and show that these techniques also render more advanced reverse-engineering techniques computationally infeasible. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy → Tamper-proof and tamper-resistant designs; Hardware attacks and countermeasures; Hardware reverse engineering; Additional