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Full-Text Articles in VLSI and Circuits, Embedded and Hardware Systems

Design Of Hardware With Quantifiable Security Against Reverse Engineering, Shahrzad Keshavarz Mar 2020

Design Of Hardware With Quantifiable Security Against Reverse Engineering, Shahrzad Keshavarz

Doctoral Dissertations

Semiconductors are a 412 billion dollar industry and integrated circuits take on important roles in human life, from everyday use in smart-devices to critical applications like healthcare and aviation. Saving today's hardware systems from attackers can be a huge concern considering the budget spent on designing these chips and the sensitive information they may contain. In particular, after fabrication, the chip can be subject to a malicious reverse engineer that tries to invasively figure out the function of the chip or other sensitive data. Subsequent to an attack, a system can be subject to cloning, counterfeiting, or IP theft. This …


Removing Redundant Logic Pathways In Polymorphic Circuits, Hanseok Kim Mar 2009

Removing Redundant Logic Pathways In Polymorphic Circuits, Hanseok Kim

Theses and Dissertations

Evaluating the quality of software and circuit obfuscators is a research goal of great interest. However, there exists little research about evaluation of obfuscation effectiveness through analyzing and investigating redundancies found in the obfuscated variants. In this research, we consider programs represented as structural combinational circuits and then analyze obfuscated variants of those circuits through a tool that produces functionally equivalent variants based on subcircuit selection and replacement. We then consider how Boolean logic and reduction affects the size and levelization of circuit variants, giving us a concrete metric by which to consider obfuscation effectiveness. To accomplish these goals, we …