Hardware Security and Intellectual Property Protection

Hardware security addresses the growing challenge of safeguarding integrated circuits and electronic systems against unauthorised access, reverse engineering, tampering and intellectual property theft. In a globalised supply chain, semiconductor designs pass through multiple untrusted parties, exposing sensitive design information and functional capabilities. Attacks range from invasive analysis and microprobing to non-invasive side-channel monitoring and algorithmic methods such as Boolean satisfiability (SAT) attacks that recover key-dependent modifications. Defences have evolved from split manufacturing and secure scan chains to more advanced methodologies including logic locking, structural and functional obfuscation, cell-level camouflaging and embedded watermarking. These techniques insert secret keys or camouflage structures to render reverse engineering cost-prohibitive, ensure device authenticity and protect royalty streams. Practical considerations such as area, power and performance overheads must be balanced against the required security level. Recent advances have emphasised resilient obfuscation schemes, low-overhead camouflaging cells, dynamic reconfiguration and novel watermarking strategies. Ongoing research explores integration with hardware root of trust, standards for benchmark evaluation and methods to thwart emerging attack vectors. The field holds global significance for critical applications in automotive, aerospace, healthcare and the Internet of Things, where compromised hardware can lead to safety failures, data breaches and economic losses.

Research from Nature Portfolio

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Hardware Security and Intellectual Property Protection publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in hardware security and intellectual property protection across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Logic locking: The insertion of key-dependent logic gates into a circuit to prevent correct operation unless the correct key is applied.

Hardware obfuscation: Techniques that conceal functional or structural details of a design to impede reverse engineering and unauthorised analysis.

Camouflaging: The use of look-alike standard cells or covert gates to hide the true logical function of circuit components.

SAT attack: A method that employs Boolean satisfiability solvers to deduce secret keys in locked hardware by eliminating incorrect key candidates.

Chromosomal DNA impression: A covert watermarking technique that encodes a hidden identifier into the hardware structure using DNA-inspired encryption.

References

1. Securing IP Cores for DSP Applications Using Structural Obfuscation and Chromosomal DNA Impression. IEEE Access (2022).
2. CAS-Lock: A Security-Corruptibility Trade-off Resilient Logic Locking Scheme. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (2019).
3. Covert Gates: Protecting Integrated Circuits with Undetectable Camouflaging. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (2019).