Enabling unauthorized RF transmission below noise floor with no detectable impact on primary communication performance

Intelligent Electromagnetic Sensors for Non-Invasive Trojan Detection

“…Much attention has been focused on hardware trojan taxonomy, development, and detection in the past two decades, especially since the Defense Science Board of US Department of Defense released a report in 2005 on the security of the supply of highperformance integrated circuits (ICs) which highlighted the need for "secure and authentic hardware" [10]. The resulting research produced numerous publications [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] which not only provide insight into existing hardware trojans, but also develop a general framework of hardware trojan understanding. This section will first briefly review hardware trojan taxonomy and detection methods, point out the lack of literature related to analog trojan development, taxonomy, and detection, and then present a number of trojans scenarios that can be possible in the analog/RF domain, specifically attacking a Class-E amplifier in the later sections.…”

Analog hardware trojan design and detection in OFDM based wireless cryptographic ICs

“…• Triggering mechanism: Most of the previous research work like [27,28,31,32] is based on "always-on" type HT. Hence, there is no dormant stage for previous implementations.…”

“…• Payload: Previous research works were focused on exploiting various properties of RF signals like amplitude, frequency [27][28], and delay spectrum [32]. The proposed HT threat model exploits the ECP properties of OFDM which is a novel exploit method.…”

“…• Detection mechanism: All previous research works like [27,28,31,32] are reliant on machine learning-based statistical algorithms to characterize power and transmission channel noise distribution, which are very complex to implement. The proposed HT detection…”

“…Literature [27][28][29][30] conducted many similar studies with HTs in the wireless cryptographic ICs and statistical side-channel (power, delay, temperature, current) was proposed for the defense. Some other notable techniques for the study of HT in the wireless cryptographic ICs proposed by researchers are Forward Error Correction (FEC) technique [31], RF Transmission below noise level [32], Hardware dithering technique [33] Information Flow Tracking (IFT) technique [34], self-referencing technique [35][36], etc. The gap in the literature mentioned for the HT in the analog/RF domain so far is that the study is specific to AM/FM modulation scheme which is not very widely used in higher speed wireless communication.…”