Transformable Electronics Implantation in ROM for Anti-Reverse Engineering

The protection of intellectual property (IP) is increasingly critical for IP vendors in the semiconductor industry. Read Only Memories (ROMs) serve as important non-volatile memory in various hardware systems to store predefined data and programs, which is critical to IP protection. Its pre-determined layout pattern makes unauthorized data extraction through chip-level reverse engineering easy to carry out. Advanced reverse engineering techniques can physically disassemble the chip and derive the IPs precisely at a much lower cost than the value of IP design that chips carry. This invasive hardware attack obtaining information from IC chips always violates the IP rights of vendors. This paper proposes a new security mechanism implanted ROM design to address the vulnerability to reverse energy attacks. Irreversible via in ROM layout transform triggered by reverse engineering completely changes the electrical properties and the physical structure of ROMs that determine the stored data. Newly-created patten will significantly increase the difficulty of reverse engineering, even lead the attackers to another working function mode. Furthermore, to improve the effectiveness of the proposed technique, a systematic design method is developed targeting integrated circuits with multiple design constraints. Two widely used ROM scheme cases have been studied to test the design method and its effectiveness. Simulations have been conducted to demonstrate the capability of the proposed technique, which generates extremely large complexity for reverse engineering with manageable overhead.

CCS Concepts: Security and privacy → Hardware reverse engineering; Hardware → Hard and soft IP