Biblio

Logic locking, and Integrated Circuit (IC) Camouflaging, are techniques that try to hide the design of an IC from a malicious foundry or end-user by introducing ambiguity into the netlist of the circuit. While over the past decade an array of such techniques have been proposed, their security has been constantly challenged by algorithmic attacks. This may in part be due to a lack of formally defined notions of security in the first place, and hence a lack of security guarantees based on long-standing hardness assumptions. In this paper we take a formal approach. We define the problem of circuit locking (cL) as transforming an original circuit to a locked one which is ``unintelligable'' without a secret key (this can model camouflaging and split-manufacturing in addition to logic locking). We define several notions of security for cL under different adversary models. Using long standing results from computational learning theory we show the impossibility of exponentially approximation-resilient locking in the presence of an oracle for large classes of Boolean circuits. We then show how exact-recovery-resiliency and a more relaxed notion of security that we coin ``best-possible'' approximation-resiliency can be provably guaranteed with polynomial overhead. Our theoretical analysis directly results in stronger attacks and defenses which we demonstrate through experimental results on benchmark circuits.

The wide use of cloud computing and of data outsourcing rises important concerns with regards to data security resulting thus in the necessity of protection mechanisms such as encryption of sensitive data. The recent major theoretical breakthrough of finding the Holy Grail of encryption, i.e. fully homomorphic encryption guarantees the privacy of queries and their results on encrypted data. However, there are only a few studies proposing a practical performance evaluation of the use of homomorphic encryption schemes in order to perform database queries. In this paper, we propose and analyse in the context of a secure framework for a generic database query interpreter two different methods in which client requests are dynamically executed on homomorphically encrypted data. Dynamic compilation of the requests allows to take advantage of the different optimizations performed during an off-line step on an intermediate code representation, taking the form of boolean circuits, and, moreover, to specialize the execution using runtime information. Also, for the returned encrypted results, we assess the complexity and the efficiency of the different protocols proposed in the literature in terms of overall execution time, accuracy and communication overhead.