POTENT: Post-Synthesis Obfuscation for Secure Network-on-Chip Architectures

Published

November 5, 2024

Author(s)

Kostas Amberiadis, Dipal Halder, Sandip Ray, Yuntao Liu, Ankur Srivastava

Abstract

We develop a novel post-synthesis obfuscation technique, POTENT, to protect NoC fabrics against reverse engineering attacks. POTENT integrates programmable switches at NoC routers, concealing topology and communication paths under a dynamically controlled key to make the design resilient to reverse-engineering attempts. By targeting post-synthesis gate-level netlist, POTENT overcomes challenges induced by logic optimization that can render pre-synthesis (RTL-level) NoC obfuscations vulnerable to SAT attacks. We extensively evaluate POTENT to demonstrate its robustness to SAT attacks. Finally, our experiments show that POTENT incurs minimal overhead on area, power, and performance.

Proceedings Title

2024 IEEE 37th International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC)

Conference Dates

September 16-19, 2024

Conference Location

Dresden, DE

Conference Title

IEEE SOCC 2024

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/SOCC62300.2024.10737820

Local Download

Keywords

Network-on-Chip (NoC), System-on-Chip (SoC), Post-synthesis obfuscation, Reverse engineering attacks

Citation

Amberiadis, K. , Halder, D. , Ray, S. , Liu, Y. and Srivastava, A. (2024), POTENT: Post-Synthesis Obfuscation for Secure Network-on-Chip Architectures, 2024 IEEE 37th International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC), Dresden, DE, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/SOCC62300.2024.10737820, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957934 (Accessed October 16, 2025)