The Need for Declarative Properties in Digital IC Security

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Mohamed El Massad, Frank Imeson, Siddharth Garg and Mahesh Tripunitara.

We emphasize the need to articulate precise, declarative properties in the context of securing Digital ICs. We do this by discussing two pieces of our work on securing Digital ICs. In one, we discuss a seemingly compelling approach to protecting Intellectual Property — IC camouflaging. We demonstrate that an adversary can carry out a decamouflaging attack, in practice, much more efficiently than previously thought. Underlying our attack is strong foundations: an identification of the computational-complexity of the problems an attacker faces, and how they can be addressed using off-the-shelf constraint solvers.