Power supply signal calibration techniques for improving detection resolution to hardware Trojans

Abstract

Chip design and fabrication is becoming increasingly vulnerable to malicious activities and alternations with globalization. An adversary can introduce a Trojan designed to disable and/or destroy a system at some future time (Time Bomb) or the Trojan may serve to leak confidential information covertly to the adversary. This paper proposes a taxonomy for Trojan classification and then describes a statistical approach for detecting hardware Trojans that is based on the analysis of an ICs power supply transient signals. A key component to improving the resolution of power analysis techniques to Trojans is calibrating for process and test environment (PE) variations. The main focus of this research is on the evaluation of four signal calibration techniques, each designed to reduce the adverse impact of PE variations on our statistical Trojan detection method.

MERO: A Statistical Approach for Hardware Trojan Detection

“…The side-channel analysis based techniques utilize the effect of an inserted Trojan on a measurable physical quantity, e.g. the supply current [1,11] or path delays [10]. Such a measured circuit parameter can be referred as a fingerprint for the IC [1].…”

“…This essentially means that the MERO patterns will induce activity in the Trojan triggering circuitry with high probability. A minimal set of patterns that is highly likely to cause activity in a Trojan is attractive in power or current signature based side-channel approach to detect hardware Trojan [1,9,11]. The detection sensitivity in these approaches depends on the induced activity in the Trojan circuit by applied test vector.…”

“…the ones with few logic gates. Thus, the technique can be used as complementary to the side-channel Trojan detection approaches [1,9,10,11] which are more effective in detecting large Trojans (e.g. ones with area > 0.1% of the total circuit area).…”

Tamper Evident Microprocessors

“…Broadly speaking, work in this area can fall into one of three categories: threats and countermeasures against malicious designers, threats and countermeasures against malicious design automation tools, and threats and countermeasures against malicious foundries. There has been some work on detecting backdoors inserted by malicious foundries that typically rely on side-channel information such as power for detection [12,16,17,24,41,54,57,70]. There has been no work on providing countermeasures against malicious designers, which this work aims to address.…”

A Unified Submodular Framework for Multimodal IC Trojan Detection

“…The underlying mathematical and logical circuit structure or the process variations are not considered. Rad et al [24,23] investigate power supply transient signal analysis methods for detecting Trojans. The focus is on test signatures and not on the lower-level components (e.g., the gate level characteristics).…”