Query: the end of logic locking

Candidate papers:

abstract: The globalization of integrated circuit (IC) supply chain and the emergence of threats, such as intellectual property (IP) piracy, reverse engineering, and hardware Trojans, have forced semiconductor companies to revisit the trust in the supply chain. Logic locking is emerging as a popular and effective countermeasure against these threats. Over the years, multiple logic techniques have been developed. Moreover, a number of attacks have been proposed that expose the security vulnerabilities of these techniques. This paper highlights the key developments in the logic locking research and presents a comprehensive literature review of logic locking.
author_names: Muhammad Yasin

Ozgur Sinanoglu
title: Evolution of logic locking
venue: 2017 IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI SoC)
year: 2017

abstract: With continuously shrinking feature sizes of integrated circuits, the vast majority of semiconductor companies have become fabless, i.e. chip manufacturing has been outsourced to foundries across the globe. However, by outsourcing critical stages of IC fabrication, the design house puts trust in entities which may have malicious intents. This exposes the design industry to a number of threats, including piracy via unauthorized overproduction and subsequent reselling on the black market. One alleged solution for this problem is logic locking, also known as logic encryption, where the genuine functionality of a chip is "locked" using a key only known to the designer. If a correct key is provided, the design works as intended but with an incorrect key, the circuit produces faulty outputs. As the keys are inserted by the designer after production, an adversarial foundry should not be able to unlock overproduced chips. In this work, we highlight major shortcomings of proposed logic locking schemes. They are primarily due to the absence of a well defined and realistic attacker model in the current literature. To this end, we characterize physical capabilities of a malicious foundry, especially with respect to invasive attacks. This allows us to derive an attacker model that matches reality, yielding attacks against the foundations of locking schemes beyond the usually employed SAT based attacks. Our analysis shows that no previously proposed logic locking scheme is able to achieve the intended protection goals against piracy in real world scenarios. As an important conclusion, we argue that there are strong indications that logic locking will most likely never be secure against a determined malicious foundry.
author_names: Susanne Engels

Max Hoffmann

Christof Paar
title: The End of Logic Locking? A Critical View on the Security of Logic Locking
venue: IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch.
year: 2019

abstract: The transactional memory programming paradigm is gaining momentum as the approach of choice for replacing locks in concurrent programming. This paper introduces the transactional locking II (TL2) algorithm, a software transactional memory (STM) algorithm based on a combination of commit time locking and a novel global version clock based validation technique. TL2 improves on state of the art STMs in the following ways: (1) unlike all other STMs it fits seamlessly with any system's memory life cycle, including those using malloc/free (2) unlike all other lock based STMs it efficiently avoids periods of unsafe execution, that is, using its novel version clock validation, user code is guaranteed to operate only on consistent memory states, and (3) in a sequence of high performance benchmarks, while providing these new properties, it delivered overall performance comparable to (and in many cases better than) that of all former STM algorithms, both lock based and non blocking. Perhaps more importantly, on various benchmarks, TL2 delivers performance that is competitive with the best hand crafted fine grained concurrent structures. Specifically, it is ten fold faster than a single lock. We believe these characteristics make TL2 a viable candidate for deployment of transactional memory today, long before hardware transactional support is available.
author_names: David Dice

Ori Shalev

Nir Shavit
title: Transactional Locking II
venue: DISC
year: 2006

abstract: A unified approach to program verification is suggested, which applies to both sequential and parallel programs. The main proof method suggested is that of temporal reasoning in which the time dependence of events is the basic concept. Two formal systems are presented for providing a basis for temporal reasoning. One forms a formalization of the method of intermittent assertions, while the other is an adaptation of the tense logic system Kb, and is particularly suitable for reasoning about concurrent programs.
author_names: Amir Pnueli
title: The temporal logic of programs
venue: 18th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1977)
year: 1977

abstract: Abstract A theoretical analysis is made of the evolution of behavioural strategies in contest situations. It is assumed that behaviour will evolve so as to maximize individual fitness. If so, a population will evolve an 'evolutionarily stable strategy' or ESS, which can be defined as a strategy such that, if all members of a population adopt it, no 'mutant' strategy can do better. A number of simple models of contest situations are analysed from this point of view. It is concluded that in 'symmetric' contests the ESS is likely to be a 'mixed' strategy; that is, either the population will be genetically polymorphic or individuals will be behaviourally variable. Most real contests are probably asymmetric, either in pay off to the contestants, or in size or weapons, or in some 'uncorrelated' fashion; i.e. in a fashion which does not substantially bias either the pay offs or the likely outcome of an escalated contest. An example of an uncorrelated asymmetry is that between the 'discoverer' of a resource and a 'late comer' It is shown that the ESS in asymmetric contests will usually be to permit the asymmetric cue to settle the contest without escalation. Escalated contests will, however, occur if information to the contestants about the asymmetry is imperfect.
author_names: John Maynard Smith

Geoffrey A Parker
title: The logic of asymmetric contests
venue: Animal Behaviour
year: 1976

abstract: In the last quarter of the twentieth century, trends in seven different regions converged to change the political landscape of the world: 1) the fall of right wing authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe in the mid1970s; 2) the replacement of military dictatorships by elected civilian governments across Latin America from the late 1970s through the late 1980s; 3) the decline of authoritarian rule in parts of East and South Asia starting in the mid 1980s; 4) the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s; 5) the breakup of the Soviet Union and the establishment of 15 post Soviet republics in 1991; 6) the decline of one party regimes in many parts of sub Saharan Africa in the first half of the 1990s; and 7) a weak but recognizable liberalizing trend in some Middle Eastern countries in the 1990s. The causes, shape, and pace of these different trends varied considerably. But they shared a dominant characteristic simultaneous movement in at least several countries in each region away from dictatorial rule toward more liberal and often more democratic governance. And though differing in many ways, these trends influenced and to some extent built on one another. As a result, they were considered by many observers, especially in the West, as component parts of a larger whole, a global democratic trend that thanks to Samuel Huntington has widely come to be known as the "third wave" of democracy. This striking tide of political change was seized upon with enthusiasm by the U.S. government and the broader U.S. foreign policy community. As early as the mid 1980s, President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. He is the author of many works on democracy promotion, including Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (1999) and is the coeditor with Marina Ottaway of Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion (2000)
author_names: Thomas Carothers
title: The End of the Transition Paradigm
year: 2002

abstract: The authors of this ambitious book address a fundamental political question: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office while those who preside over corruption, war, and misery endure? Considering this political puzzle, they also answer the related economic question of why some countries experience successful economic development and others do not. The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how institutions for selecting leaders create incentives for leaders to pursue good and bad public policy. They also extend the model to explain the consequences of war on political survival. Throughout the book, they provide illustrations from history, ranging from ancient Sparta to Vichy France, and test the model against statistics gathered from cross national data. The authors explain the political intuition underlying their theory in nontechnical language, reserving formal proofs for chapter appendixes. They conclude by presenting policy prescriptions based on what has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically.
author_names: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Alastair David Smith

Randolph M Siverson

James D Morrow
title: The Logic of Political Survival
year: 2003

abstract: A bow string release device for use by archers to effect controlled consistent release of a bow string and discharge of an arrow. The release device includes a pair of movably connected jaw members each having a forwardly extended lip. The lips are movable with the jaw members toward each other to provide a bow string retaining eye, and away from each other to provide an open throat for release of the bow string. Digital pressure on finger engaging arms located on each jaw member governs opening and closure of the lips. The jaw members are substantially coplanar in their entirety. The device has finger release portions that are positioned between the pin pivotally connecting jaw members and a bow string being operated upon. The jaw members may be connected by a flexible beam that is flexed in order to have the jaw members move relative to one another.
author_names: Trudy L Schwartz
title: The Logic of Collective Action
year: 1986

abstract: Conflicts between animals of the same species usually are of "limited war" type, not causing serious injury. This is often explained as due to group or species selection for behaviour benefiting the species rather than individuals. Game theory and computer simulation analyses show, however, that a "limited war" strategy benefits individual animals as well as the species.
author_names: J Maynard Smith

GEORGE R Price
title: The Logic of Animal Conflict
venue: Nature
year: 1973

abstract: The temporal logic of actions (TLA) is a logic for specifying and reasoning about concurrent systems. Systems and their properties are represented in the same logic, so the assertion that a system meets its specification and the assertion that one system implements another are both expressed by logical implication. TLA is very simple; its syntax and complete formal semantics are summarized in about a page. Yet, TLA is not just a logician's toy; it is extremely powerful, both in principle and in practice. This report introduces TLA and describes how it is used to specify and verify concurrent algorithms. The use of TLA to specify and reason about open systems will be described elsewhere.
author_names: Leslie Lamport
title: The temporal logic of actions
venue: TOPL
year: 1994