Hardware-Efficient Compound IC Protection with Lightweight Cryptography

About

Over the years, many techniques have been introduced to protect integrated circuits (ICs) from hardware security threats that emerged in the globalized IC manufacturing supply chain, such as overproduction and piracy. However, most of these techniques have been rendered inefficient since they do not rely on provably secure algorithms. Moreover, the previously proposed techniques using cryptography algorithms lead to a significant increase in hardware complexity and are vulnerable to the removal and power analysis attacks. In this paper, we propose a compound IC protection mechanism that uses a lightweight cryptography algorithm with prominent logic locking and hardware obfuscation techniques. Experimental results show that the secure designs generated by the developed tool have significantly less hardware complexity when compared to those generated by previously proposed techniques using cryptography algorithms and are resilient to existing removal, algebraic, and logic locking attacks.

Levent Aksoy, Muhammad Sohaib Munir, Sedat Akleylek · 2026

Related benchmarks

Task	Dataset	Result
Hardware Synthesis Evaluation	ITC'99 b17_C	Area32919	7
Hardware Synthesis Evaluation	ITC b19_C 99	Area138218	7
Hardware Synthesis Evaluation	ITC'99 b20_C	Area19431	7
Hardware Synthesis Evaluation	ITC b22_C '99	Area24139	7
Logic Locking Attack Resistance	ITC'99 b17_C	Nok1760	7
Logic Locking Attack Resistance	b19_C ITC'99 benchmark suite	NOK (Number of Keys)1832	7
Logic Locking Attack Resistance	b20_C ITC'99	nok1796	7
Logic Locking Attack Resistance	b22_C ITC'99	Nok Count448	7