HLS Driven Obfuscation of DSP Hardware IP Designs using Non-invertible Arbitrary Function and Reconfigurable Intertwined Obfuscation Logic

Abstract

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) hardware intellectual property (IP) designs are pivotal to the proliferation of consumer electronics (CE) systems such as camera, camcorder, smart watch, smart TVs, IoT etc. Such DSP hardware IPs is typically designed using high level synthesis (HLS) framework. However, with the globalization of integrated circuit/system-on-chip (SoC) design supply chain, emergence of threats such as reverse engineering (RE) has become a matter of grave concern. This paper presents novel HLS-driven functional obfuscation of DSP hardware IP designs using non-invertible arbitrary function and reconfigurable intertwined obfuscation logic. The proposed approach thwarts RE attack by hindering various forms of threats such as key-sensitization attack, removal attack, different versions of SAT attack and ML attack. Results of the proposed approach revealed significantly greater obfuscation strength (causing reduced probability of attacks) than prior approaches. © 2026 IEEE.