Security-aware Physical Design against Trojan Insertion, Frontside Probing, and Fault Injection Attacks

The dramatic growth of hardware attacks and the lack of security-concern solutions in design tools lead to severe security problems in modern IC designs. Although many existing countermeasures provide decent protection against security issues, they still lack the global design view with sufficient security consideration in design time. This paper proposes a security-aware framework against Trojan insertion, frontside probing, and fault injection attacks at the design stage. The framework consists of two major techniques: (1) a large-scale shielding method that effectively covers the exposed areas of assets and (2) a cell-movement-based method to eliminate the empty spaces vulnerable to Trojan insertion. Experimental results show that our framework effectively reduces the vulnerability of these attacks and achieves the best overall score compared with the top-3 teams in the 2022 ACM ISPD Security Closure of Physical Layouts Contest.