GAUR: Genetic Algorithm based Unlocking of Register Transfer Level Locking

Logic locking is a technique for the protection of hardware intellectual property (IP) from malicious entities like piracy, overproduction, reverse engineering, etc. The register transfer level (RTL) locking performs the locking on RTL description for protection of the IP even from the early design cycle. TAO [12] is such a locking scheme that employs locking during the high-level synthesis (HLS) process. In this paper, we evaluate the unlocking capability of the genetic algorithm (GA) by performing attacks on the RTLs locked using TAO based technique. We demonstrate the ability of GA to unlock TAO generated RTLs in seconds. Our GA based attack is faster as compared to the Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) based attack [9]. The GA based method also converges well in most of the cases as shown in the experimental results.