Hardware-Software Co-Design Based Obfuscation of Hardware Accelerators

Existing logic obfuscation approaches aim to protect hardware design IPs from SAT attack by increasing query count and output corruptibility of a locked netlist. In this paper, we demonstrate the ineffectiveness of such techniques to obfuscate hardware accelerator platforms. Subsequently, we propose a Hardware/software co-design based Accelerator Obfuscation (HSCAO) scheme to provably safeguard the IP of such designs against SAT as well as removal/bypass type of attacks while still maintaining high output corruptability for applications. The attack resiliency of HSCAO scheme is manifested by using a sequence of keys to obfuscate instruction encoding for an application. Experimental evaluations utilizing an accelerator simulator demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed countermeasure.