Hardware Obfuscation and Logic Locking: A Tutorial Introduction

Editor's note: If you are designing or integrating hardware IP blocks into your designs, and you are using common global supply chains, then reading this overview article on how to protect your IP against reverse engineering, piracy, and malicious alteration attacks is a must. The authors give a comprehensive overview of current countermeasures that can be used at RTL, gate-, and layout-level to protect your design with a focus on combinational and sequential logic locking and a discussion on merits, overheads, and shortcomings of such techniques. -Jürgen Teich, FAU Erlangen.