A Unifying logic encryption security metric

The globalization of the IC supply chain has brought forth the era of fabless companies. Due to security issues during design and fabrication processes, various security concerns have risen, ranging from IP piracy and reverse engineering to hardware Trojans. Logic encryption has emerged as a mitigation against these threats. However, no generic metrics for quantifying the security of logic encryption algorithms has been reported so far, making it impossible to formally compare different approaches. In this paper, we propose a unifying metric, capturing the key security aspects of logic encryption algorithms. The metric is evaluated on state-of-the-art algorithms and benchmarks.