Reconstructing Boolean Functions From MAGIC Logic-in-Memory Using Power Side-Channel Attacks

IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, vol. 34, pp. 3090–3097

Abstract

Memristors have become an important post-CMOS technology that enables new computing paradigms such as logic-in-memory (LIM) with MAGIC. With MAGIC, binary switching states are used to implement basic logic functions that offer a promising alternative to conventional FPGAs with better energy efficiency. These new processing paradigms come with new hardware security challenges. In this article, we investigate how the netlist of confidential intellectual property (IP), implemented using LIM, can be reverse-engineered. We present a power side-channel in MAGIC and show that structural information about the IP is leaked. We propose a novel recovery algorithm, which combines several side-channel attacks (SCAs) to recover the netlist of the IP. On the ISCAS85 benchmarks, the algorithm needs just 350 SCAs to identify circuits with 2000 + gates.

Authors 3

1. Lorenzo Pfeifer Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University

2. Rainer Leupers Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University

3. Jan Moritz Joseph Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University