Malicious circuitry detection using transient power analysis for IC security

Abstract

Malicious modification of integrated circuits (ICs) in untrusted foundry, referred to as “Hardware Trojan”, has emerged as a serious security threat. Since it is extremely difficult to detect the presence of such Trojan circuits using conventional testing strategies, side-channel analysis has been considered as an alternative. In this paper, we proposed a non-destructive side-channel approach that characterizes and compares transient power signature using principle component analysis to achieve the hardware Trojan detection. The approach is validated with hardware measurement results using an FPGA-based test setup for large design including a 128-bit AES cipher. Experimental results show that this approach can discover small (<;1.1% area) Trojans under large noise and variations.