Towards a Hardware Trojan Detection Cycle

Abstract

Intentionally inserted malfunctions in integrated circuits, referred to as Hardware Trojans, have become an emerging threat. Recently, the scientific community started to propose technical approaches to mitigate the threat of unspecified and potentially malicious functionality. However, these detection and prevention mechanisms are still hardly integrated in the industry's Hardware development life cycles. We therefore propose in this work a secure hardware development life cycle that assembles methods from trustworthy software engineering. In addition to full traceability from specification to implementation, and down to each gate, we introduce a feedback detection cycle that systematically escorts every single step of the development process. To do so, we integrate different detection methods for each development phase that are derived from a common knowledge base.