Development and Evaluation of Hardware Obfuscation Benchmarks

Abstract

Obfuscation is a promising solution for securing hardware intellectual property (IP) against various attacks, such as reverse engineering, piracy, and tampering. Due to the lack of standard benchmarks, proposed techniques by researchers and practitioners in the community are evaluated by existing benchmark suites such as ISCAS-85, ISCAS-89, and ITC-99. These open source benchmarks, though widely utilized, are not necessarily suitable for the purpose of evaluating hardware obfuscation techniques. In this context, we believe that it is important to establish a set of well-defined benchmarks, on which the effectiveness of new and existing obfuscation techniques and attacks on them can be compared. In this paper, we describe a set of such benchmarks obfuscated with some popular methods that we created to facilitate this need. These benchmarks have been made publicly available on Trust-Hub web portal. Moreover, we provide the first evaluation of several obfuscation approaches based on the metrics and existing attacks using this new suite. Finally, we discuss our observations and guidance for future work in hardware obfuscation and benchmarking.