# Threats on Logic Locking: A Decade Later

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05896 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05896/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Deceptive Logic Locking for Hardware Integrity Protection against Machine Learning Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08695/) (2021)
- [A Neural Network-based SAT-Resilient Obfuscation Towards Enhanced Logic Locking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05799/) (2022)
- [Logic Locking at the Frontiers of Machine Learning: A Survey on Developments and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01915/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To reduce the cost of ICs and to meet the market's demand, a considerable portion of manufacturing supply chain, including silicon fabrication, packaging and testing may be pushed offshore. Utilizing a global IC manufacturing supply chain, and inclusion of non-trusted parties in the supply chain has raised concerns over security and trust related challenges including those of overproduction, counterfeiting, IP piracy, and Hardware Trojans to name a few. To reduce the risk of IC manufacturing in an untrusted and globally distributed supply chain, the researchers have proposed various locking and obfuscation mechanisms for hiding the functionality of the ICs during the manufacturing, that requires the activation of the IP after fabrication using the key value(s) that is only known to the IP/IC owner. At the same time, many such proposed obfuscation and locking mechanisms are broken with attacks that exploit the inherent vulnerabilities in such solutions. The past decade of research in this area, has resulted in many such defense and attack solutions. In this paper, we review a decade of research on hardware obfuscation from an attacker perspective, elaborate on attack and defense lessons learned, and discuss future directions that could be exploited for building stronger defenses.