Can Agents Secure Hardware? Evaluating Agentic LLM-Driven Obfuscation for IP Protection

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 14 Apr 2026] Can Agents Secure Hardware? Evaluating Agentic LLM-Driven Obfuscation for IP Protection Sujan Ghimire, Parsa Mirfasihi, Muhtasim Alam Chowdhury, Veeramani Pugazhenthi, Harish Kumar Dharavath, Farshad Firouzi, Rozhin Yasaei, Pratik Satam, Soheil Salehi The globalization of integrated circuit (IC) design and manufacturing has increased the exposure of hardware intellectual property (IP) to untrusted stages of the supply chain, raising concerns about reverse engineering, piracy, tampering, and overbuilding. Hardware netlist obfuscation is a promising countermeasure, but automating the generation of functionally correct and security-relevant obfuscated circuits remains challenging, particularly for benchmark-scale designs. This paper presents an agentic, large language model (LLM)-driven framework for automated hardware netlist obfuscation. The proposed framework combines retrieval-grounded planning, structured lock-plan generation, deterministic netlist compilation, functional verification, and SAT-based security evaluation. Rather than a single prompt-to-output generation step, the framework decomposes the task into specialized stages for circuit analysis, synthesis, verification, and attack evaluation. We evaluate the framework on ISCAS-85 benchmarks using functional equivalence checking and SAT-based attacks. Results show that the framework generates correct locked netlists while introducing measurable output corruption under incorrect keys, while SAT attacks remain effective. These findings highlight both the potential and current limitations of agentic LLM-driven obfuscation. Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures, Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.13298 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.13298v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.13298 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Sujan Ghimire [view email] [v1] Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:04:48 UTC (241 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)