How secure is split manufacturing in preventing hardware trojan?
With the trend of outsourcing fabrication, split manufacturing is regarded as a promising way to both provide the high end nodes in untrusted external foundries and protect the design from potential attackers. However, in this work, we show that split manufacturing is not inherently secure. A hardware trojan attacker can still discover necessary information with a simulated annealing based attack approach at the placement level. We further propose a defense approach by moving the insecure gates away from their easily attacked candidate locations. Experimental results on benchmark circuits show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
2016 IEEE Asian Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (AsianHOST)