Towards Oracle-Guided Key Recovery in Logic Locking Techniques using Differential Cryptanalysis

Abstract

Logic locking is a protection technique for outsourced integrated circuit (IC) designs that thwarts IC piracy and IC counterfeiting by untrusted foundries. In this paper, we mount differential attacks on random logic locking (RLL), fault-analysis-based logic locking (FLL), and strong logic locking (SLL) techniques, in which we present three attack modes. We present our results on c432 ISCAS’85 benchmark circuits. In differential attacks, we could recover the embedded secret key in a device with attack effort lesser than an exhaustive search attack. In cases where we meet limitations in the attack modes, we present a formal approach to mount the oracle-guided differential cryptanalysis on a logic locked circuit. ©2025 IEEE.