Security Analysis for SCONE Logic Locking

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03288v1
• Date: Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:57:29 GMT
• Title: Security Analysis for SCONE Logic Locking
• Abstract summary: SCONE [DAC'25] expands a logic locking interface with additional encoded inputs from the original primary inputs.<n>We show that both realizations are vulnerable, but for different reasons.<n>We propose a lightweight non-linear mitigation and show that it does not exhibit the vulnerabilities identified in this paper.
• Score: 8.289792786302579
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: SCONE [DAC'25] expands a logic locking interface with additional encoded inputs derived from the original primary inputs, and admits two realizations: a \textit{with-ES} variant, where the critical encoding stage is implemented in hardware, and a \textit{without-ES} variant, where the locked design directly exposes an encoded interface of width $n+m$. We show that both realizations are vulnerable, but for different reasons. For the without-ES variant, we prove that, when the added encoded inputs are deterministic linear functions of the original inputs, the valid encoded-input space remains $n$-dimensional despite the nominal expansion to $n+m$ inputs. Hence, the widened interface does not yield $m$ additional or independent brute-force dimensions. For the with-ES variant, we present a polynomial-time white-box attack that exactly recovers the added-input count and the implemented linear encoding relation from the locked netlist, achieving 100\% recovery over all evaluated instances. We also develop a black-box procedure that certifies the same dimensionality collapse from valid encoded-input samples without reconstructing the hidden encoder. Experiments on ISCAS-85 and ITC-99 benchmarks validate both results, and we further demonstrate exact white-box recovery on an ARM Cortex-M0 RTL benchmark. Finally, we propose a lightweight non-linear mitigation and show that it does not exhibit the vulnerabilities identified in this paper under all representative attack sets considered in SCONE.

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