Paper 2024/309

NiLoPher: Breaking a Modern SAT-Hardened Logic-Locking Scheme via Power Analysis Attack

Abstract

LoPher brings, for the first time, cryptographic security promises to the field of logic locking in a bid to break the game of cat-and-mouse seen in logic locking. Toward this end, LoPher embeds the circuitry to lock within multiple rounds of a block cipher, by carefully configuring all the S-Boxes. To realize general Boolean functionalities and to support varying interconnect topologies, LoPher also introduces additional layers of MUXes between S-Boxes and the permutation operations. The authors of LoPher claim resilience against SAT-based attacks in particular. Here, we show the first successful attack on LoPher. First, we uncover a significant limitation for LoPher’s key-space configuration, resulting in large numbers of equivalent keys and, thus, a largely simplified search space for attackers in practice. Second, motivated by their well-proven working against ciphers, we employ a power side-channel attack against LoPher. We find that ISCAS-85 benchmarks locked with LoPher can all be broken in few thousands of traces. Finally, we also outline a simple and low-cost countermeasure to render LoPher more secure.