Hiding Circuit Components Using Boundary Blurring Techniques

Protecting circuitry from reverse engineering is extremely important for critical technologies. When systems designed for security become compromised, millions of dollars and countless labor hours may be required for redesigning new protection circuitry. Similarly, an organization using reverse engineering techniques for reproducing systems can do so with significantly lower costs. Component identification is an essential step to reverse engineering. Techniques which increase the necessary time for discovering circuit components, and in turn delay or even defeat component identification, increase the level of circuit protection against reverse engineering and other adversarial attacks. In this paper, we discuss our Java based component identification tool implementation. We also introduce two component hiding algorithms and show they effectively defeat component identification.