CamSkyGate: camouflaged skyrmion gates for protecting ICs

Magnetic skyrmion has the potential to become one of the candidates for emerging technologies due to its ultra-high integration density and ultra-low energy. Skyrmion is a magnetic pattern created by transverse current injection in the ferromagnetic (FM) layer. A skyrmion can be generated by localized spin-polarized current and behaves like a stable pseudoparticle. Different logic gates have been proposed, where the presence or absence of a single skyrmion is represented as binary logic 1 or logic 0, respectively. In this paper, we propose novel camouflaged logic gate designs to prevent an adversary from extracting the original netlist. The proposal uses differential doping to block the propagation of the skyrmions to realize the camouflaged gates. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose camouflaged skyrmion gates to prevent an adversary from performing reverse engineering. We demonstrate the functionality of different camouflaged gates using the mumax 3 micromagnetic simulator. We have also evaluated the security of the proposed camouflaged designs using SAT attacks. We show that the same security from the traditional CMOS-based camouflaged circuits can be retained.

• Hardware → Spintronics and magnetic technologies; • Security and privacy → Hardware attacks and countermeasures; Hardware attacks and countermeasures.