Design companies often outsource their integrated circuit (IC) fabrication to third parties where ICs are susceptible to malicious acts such as the insertion of a side-channel hardware trojan horse (SCT). In this paper, we present a framework for designing and inserting an SCT based on an engineering change order (ECO) flow, which makes it the first to disclose how effortlessly a trojan can be inserted into an IC. The trojan is designed with the goal of leaking multiple bits per power signature reading. Our findings and results show that a rogue element within a foundry has, today, all means necessary for performing a foundry-side attack via ECO.Index Terms-hardware security, manufacturing-time attack, hardware trojan horse, side-channel attack, VLSI, ASIC.

Recent multimedia applications demand very high performance to support real-time video encoding. More specifically the mechanism of image block matching is one of the most critical encoder algorithms in terms of computational costs. It is responsible by searching for similar pixel macroblocks when comparing the current macroblock with others in reference images. The SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences) calculation is largelly used as comparation method in different block matching algorithms. This paper purposes a new strategy of SAD method implementation optimized to modern DSP microprocessor architectures like IBM Cell®. Practical results of our proposed method in a H.264/AVC encoder indicate a gain of more than eigth times for each computing unit when compared with original reference code performance.

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