Enhancement of Hardware Security by combining Multiple Cell Obfuscation with Anti-SAT and SARLock techniques

Boolean SATisfiability Attack (SAT) is a well known attack that targets netlists of digital circuits to acquire the key bits. To thwart the attack Anti-SAT and SAT AttackResilient Logic Locking (SARLock) are two common defense strategies that still have applications cited in contemporary literature. In this paper, these two defense strategies are dissected and combined with obfuscation to shed light on possible new ideas. The security of the proposed hardware is shown to be of the order of Anti-SAT or SARLock alone. However, the overhead associated with the proposition is minimal and comparable to unaided Anti-SAT or SARLock.