  Intellectual Property (IP) theft is a serious concern for the integrated
circuit (IC) industry. To address this concern, logic locking countermeasure
transforms a logic circuit to a different one to obfuscate its inner details.
The transformation caused by obfuscation is reversed only upon application of
the programmed secret key, thus preserving the circuit's original function.
This technique is known to be vulnerable to Satisfiability (SAT)-based attacks.
But in order to succeed, SAT-based attacks implicitly assume a perfectly
reverse-engineered circuit, which is difficult to achieve in practice due to
reverse engineering (RE) errors caused by automated circuit extraction. In this
paper, we analyze the effects of random circuit RE-errors on the success of
SAT-based attacks. Empirical evaluation on ISCAS, MCNC benchmarks as well as a
fully-fledged RISC-V CPU reveals that the attack success degrades exponentially
with increase in the number of random RE-errors. Therefore, the adversaries
either have to equip RE-tools with near perfection or propose better SAT-based
attacks that can work with RE-imperfections.
