The Study on Hardware Security and Its Defense Measures

School of Communications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, 21000

^* Corresponding author. Email: 3205902561@qq.com

Abstract

With the globalization of the IC design supply chain and the universal interconnection of computers, the problem of hardware security has become increasingly prominent. The increasing number of hardware security attacks in recent years shows that integrated circuit hardware has become an effective entry point for launching cross-layer and long-range attacks, and it is urgent for academia and industry to propose effective solutions to hardware security problems. This paper focuses on the threat models, defense measures and metrics of hardware attacks including Hardware Trojans, Reverse Engineering and SAT attacks (using algorithms based on satisfiability checking) by literature analysis and comparative analysis. The result shows that most of the protection against Hardware Trojans should be planned at the design stage. Camouflage, logic confusion and watermarking are good ways to defend Reverse Engineering, and for SAT attacks, it is necessary to improve the existing logical encryption technology and use an anti-SAT module.