PoTeNt: Post-Synthesis Obfuscation for Secure Network-on-Chip Architectures

We develop a novel post-synthesis obfuscation technique, PoTent, to protect NoC fabrics against reverse-engineering attacks. PoTENt integrates programmable switches at NoC routers, concealing topology and communication paths under a dynamically controlled key to make the design resilient to reverse-engineering attempts. By targeting post-synthesis gatelevel netlist, PoTent overcomes challenges induced by logic optimization that can render pre-synthesis (RTL-level) NoC obfuscations vulnerable to SAT attacks. We extensively evaluate PoTENT to demonstrate its robustness to SAT attacks. Finally, our experiments show that PoTENt incurs minimal overhead on area, power, and performance.