Advancing Hardware Security Using Polymorphic and Stochastic Spin‐Hall Effect Devices
Satwik Patnaik1,a, Nikhil Rangarajan1,b, Johann Knechtel2,d, Ozgur Sinanoglu2,e and Shaloo Rakheja1,c
1Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, New York, USA
asp4012@nyu.edu
bnikhil.rangarajan@nyu.edu
cshaloo.rakheja@nyu.edu
2Division of Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
djohann@nyu.edu
eozgursin@nyu.edu
ABSTRACT
Protecting intellectual property (IP) in electronic circuits has become a serious challenge in recent years. Logic locking/encryption and layout camouflaging are two prominent techniques for IP protection. Most existing approaches, however, particularly those focused on CMOS integration, incur excessive design overheads resulting from their need for additional circuit structures or device‐level modifications. This work leverages the innate polymorphism of an emerging spin‐based device, called the giant spin-Hall effect (GSHE) switch, to simultaneously enable locking and camouflaging within a single instance. Using the GSHE switch, we propose a powerful primitive that enables cloaking all the 16 Boolean functions possible for two inputs. We conduct a comprehensive study using state‐of‐the‐art Boolean satisfiability (SAT) attacks to demonstrate the superior resilience of the proposed primitive in comparison to several others in the literature. While we tailor the primitive for deterministic computation, it can readily support stochastic computation; we argue that stochastic behavior can break most, if not all, existing SAT attacks. Finally, we discuss the resilience of the primitive against various side‐channel attacks as well as invasive monitoring at runtime, which are arguably even more concerning threats than SAT attacks.
