arXiv (Cornell University)
Unraveling Latch Locking Using Machine Learning, Boolean Analysis, and ILP
April 2023 • Dake Chen, Xuan Zhou, Yinghua Hu, Yuke Zhang, Kaixin Yang, Andrew Rittenbach, Pierluigi Nuzzo, Peter A. Beerel
Logic locking has become a promising approach to provide hardware security in the face of a possibly insecure fabrication supply chain. While many techniques have focused on locking combinational logic (CL), an alternative latch-locking approach in which the sequential elements are locked has also gained significant attention. Latch (LAT) locking duplicates a subset of the flip-flops (FF) of a design, retimes these FFs and replaces them with latches, and adds two types of decoy latches to obfuscate the netlist. It…