Secure Computation Laboratory

Reverse engineering of integrated circuits: algorithms and countermeasures

This talk presents research into ways that chips can hold information that is, hopefully, inaccessible to attackers using invasive reverse engineering. The reasons for storing the information include key security and IP protection, but in each case the designer's task is essentially one of obfuscation, and the attackers task is deobfuscation. The presentation will address the following topics: (1) secure key storage using SRAM-based physical unclonable functions, (2) reverse engineering obfuscated circuits using Boolean Satisfiability solvers, and (3) design automation for improving obfuscation of logic circuits. These works are in collaboration with many colleagues at UMass and elsewhere.