Obfuscating DSP Hardware Accelerators in CE Systems Using Pseudo Operations Mixing

Abstract

Digital signal processor (DSP) hardware accelerators are integrated in consumer electronics (CE) systems to facilitate image, audio and video processing applications. However, DSP hardware accelerators are vulnerable to hardware Trojan insertion threat because of involvement of untrusted offshore entities in the design chain. This leads to integration of Trojan infected designs into consumer electronics products, hence causing reliability and safety concerns for end consumers. Structural obfuscation is a security mechanism which offers a preventive control against Trojan insertion threat. This paper presents a pseudo operations mixing (POM) based novel structural obfuscation technique to secure DSP hardware accelerators against reverse engineering (RE), causing Trojan insertion threat. The proposed approach yielded a robust security at minimal design cost overhead than similar previous work.