Did you know that even your chips have essentially anti-virus techniques on them? Even I didn’t before this one.
I approached Prof. Shubham Sahay for a project on Security, and he pointed me to look into Logic Locking. The idea is to build logic circuits with inherent security mechanism, usually in form of extra inputs to the circuit as the key. I liked the idea and went through a literature review. The Professor then showed me a custom logic architecture that his group had devised that used 3D NAND Flash Memory as a logic circuit, with impressive stats of what it’s capable of computing. Being a bit skeptic, I pointed out some flaws in the architecture, but continued to thinking of ways to develop a defense/logic locking mechanism for that architecture that’s resilient to SAT attacks asked by the Prof. specifically because of the attack’s prominence. Inspired by State Machines, I devised a way that assumes no hardware overhead in the memory itself, with assumptions on the Memory Controller. I furthur implemented a brute force attacking mechanism and implemented them all in Python. The beauty of the defense, Wordline Finite State Machine is what I call it, that it can be extended to infinite key space!