Logic Obfuscation using Metasurface Holography

Over the years, system design companies have developed sophisticated and accurate Reverse Engineering (RE) tools to debug the functionality of their own designs, ensure the legitimacy of their Intellectual Properties (IPs), and to some extent-gather information on their competitors. Technologies such as optical imaging, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Tunneling Electron Microscopy (TEM), X-ray Tomography, etc. have made it possible to acquire images of individual layers of a delayered Integrated Circuit (IC) with superfine resolution. State-of-the-art tools such as ICWorks from Chipworks can perform automatic extraction of netlists from images of each layer. An adversary can unlock valuable IPs through such attacks and pirate the design or sell the cloned IP to other competitors for unjust motives. Logic and interconnect obfuscation have been proposed to make the RE effort behind such approaches prohibitively high for the adversaries. Several solutions have been proven to be vulnerable to Satisfiability (SAT) based attacks where an adversary can deobfuscate the circuit reasonably quickly. In this paper, we have presented a novel obfuscation technique based on the concepts of cloaked nets and fake holographic gates using metasurface holography. The proposed approach can address optical and X-ray imaging based RE.