A novel crosstalk based dynamic camouflage technique for preventing reverse engineering

Abstract

Reverse engineering has been a serious threat to integrated circuit hardware security, and gate camouflaging is effective to resist it. Existing camouflage techniques often require process change or rely on emerging devices, and they generally come with significant costs and overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic camouflage technique based on crosstalk, and used dynamic CMOS to design three camouflaged gates: BUF, AND, and OR. Our technique transmits signal without physical connections, which not only obfuscates the functionality of the logic gates but also conceal the real source of the signal. Moreover, it does not require any process changes. Simulation results show the average area, delay and power overhead is 3.07X, 1.75X and 0.8X respectively comparing to standard dynamic gates. The proposed technique also operates reliably under various Process, Voltage, and Temperature (PVT) conditions.