Tracks

The participating teams will compete to bypass/remove/reverse-engineer the countermeasures, implemented into the (soft/firm) hardware IPs, and to get access to the design functionality. Several countermeasure techniques will be implemented in order to prevent access to the design functionality. The provided designs will be divided in multiple tracks as listed below:

  • State Space Obfuscation (with oracle)
  • State Space Obfuscation (without oracle)
  • Combinational Logic Locking (with Oracle)
  • Combinational Logic Locking (without Oracle)
  • LUT Configuration (with Oracle)
  • LUT Configuration (without Oracle)
  • NoC Routing Table Configuration (with Oracle)
  • NoC Routing Table Configuration (without Oracle)
In each track, there will be designs of three different categories based on the complexity of the designs as mentioned below. The teams should expect multiple designs in each category:
  • Lowest Complexity
  • Medium Complexity
  • Highest Complexity

Checkpoints

For each design, there will be a set of checkpoints. To capture the finish flag, teams will need to go through each of these checkpoints sequentially. The set of checkpoints will differ based on the type of the track- combinational or sequential. The checkpoints are listed below (will be updated soon with additional details):

  • State Space Obfuscation Checkpoints
    1. Finding the added sequential elements.
    2. Binning the added sequential elements.
    3. Finding the initial state of unlocked design.
    4. Finding the sets of key inputs.
    5. Finding the unlocking key sequence.
  • Combinational Logic Locking Checkpoints
    1. Binning key-inputs as per the shared logic cone (including reg-reg timing groups).
    2. Recovering the unlocking key.

Evaluation/Scoring

Each design has a particular score being assigned to it for retrieving the unlocking secrets or breaking the locking scheme. Submission of each team will be evaluated based on a cumulative score which will be calculated by adding the scores of each design. By passing through the checkpoints, teams will be able to accumulate the score for each design.

  • For each design in-
    • With Oracle track: 20 points for passing each checkpoint of each design.
    • Oracle-less track: 40 points for passing each checkpoint of each design.

Challenge Resources (from organizers)

(will be updated soon with additional details)

For each track, the participating teams will have access to the following resources (provided by the organizers):

  • State Space Obfuscation: Obfuscated gate-level netlists (check References for the obfuscation scheme details), an oracle (for with oracle track), required library files.
  • Combinational Logic Locking with Oracle: Logic locked gate-level netlists (check References for the locking scheme details), an oracle (for with oracle track), required library files.

Teams are allowed to use any available resource, algorithm, or approach while applying reverse engineering attacks. However, reverse engineering of oracle is NOT allowed and does NOT count towards evaluation.