The Secure-IC s CamoGate IP has for goal to protect a circuit against reverse-engineering. Reverse engineering of an Integrated Circuit is a process which aims at identifying its structure, design and functionality. Thanks to reverse engineering it is possible to :
- Identify the device technology used in the IC
- Extract the gate-level netlist of the design
- Infer the functionality
Reverse engineering can be used for an attacker to steal intellectual property or to discover hardwired secret cryptographic parameters. For instance, one can fabricate a copy of this design by extracting the gate-level netlist.
The Hardware obfuscation technology aims at hiding the function of the gates in the circuit.