Logic Locking for Secure Outsourced Chip Fabrication: A New Attack and Provably Secure Defense Mechanism

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Mohamed El Massad, Jun Zhang, Siddharth Garg, and Mahesh V. Tripunitara

Chip designers outsource chip fabrication to external foundries, but at the risk of IP theft. Logic locking, a promising solution to mitigate this threat, adds extra logic gates (key gates) and inputs (key bits) to the chip so that it functions correctly only when the correct key, known only to the designer but not the foundry, is applied. In this paper, we identify a new vulnerability in all existing logic locking schemes.