EvoLUTe+: Fine-Grained Look-Up-Table-based RTL IP Redaction

Rui Guo; M Sazadur Rahman; Jingbo Zhou; Hadi M Kamali; Fahim Rahman; Farimah Farahmandi; Mark Tehranipoor

Paper 2025/484

EvoLUTe+: Fine-Grained Look-Up-Table-based RTL IP Redaction

Rui Guo, University of Florida

M Sazadur Rahman, University of Central Florida

Jingbo Zhou, University of Florida

Hadi M Kamali, University of Central Florida

Fahim Rahman, University of Florida

Farimah Farahmandi, University of Florida

Mark Tehranipoor, University of Florida

Abstract

Hardware obfuscation is an active trustworthy design technique targeting threats in the IC supply chain, such as IP piracy and overproduction. Recent research on Intellectual Property (IP) protection technologies suggests that using embedded reconfigurable components (e.g., eFPGA redaction) could be a promising approach to hide the functional and structural information of security-critical designs. However, such techniques suffer from almost prohibitive overhead in terms of area, power, delay, and testability. This paper proposes an obfuscation technique called EvoLUTe+, which is a unique and more fine-grained redaction approach using smaller reconfigurable components (e.g., Look-Up Tables (LUTs)). EvoLUTe+ achieves fine-grained partitioning, sub-circuit coloring, and scoring of IP, and then encrypts the original IP through the substitution of some sub-circuits. Different attacks are used to test the robustness of EvoLUTe+, including structural and machine learning attacks, as well as Bounded Model Checking (BMC) attacks. The overhead of the obfuscation design is also analyzed. Experimental results demonstrate that EvoLUTe+ exhibits robustness with acceptable overhead while resisting such threat models.

Note: Preprint.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Logic Locking Re-configurability eFPGA IP redaction Universal Function IP Protection
Contact author(s): guor @ ufl edu
mohammad rahman @ ucf edu
jingbozhou @ ufl edu
hadi mardanikamali @ ucf edu
fahimrahman @ ece ufl edu
farimah @ ece ufl edu
tehranipoor @ ece ufl edu
History: 2025-03-17: approved; 2025-03-14: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/484
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/484,
      author = {Rui Guo and M Sazadur Rahman and Jingbo Zhou and Hadi M Kamali and Fahim Rahman and Farimah Farahmandi and Mark Tehranipoor},
      title = {{EvoLUTe}+: Fine-Grained Look-Up-Table-based {RTL} {IP} Redaction},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/484},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/484}
}