Software exploitable hardware Trojans in embedded processor

Abstract

Growing threat of hardware Trojan attacks in untrusted foundry or design house has motivated researchers around the world to analyze the threat and develop effective countermeasures. In this paper, we focus on analyzing a specific class of hardware Trojans in embedded processor that can be enabled by software or data to leak critical information. These Trojans pose a serious threat in pervasively deployed embedded systems. An attacker can trigger these Trojans to extract valuable information from a system during field deployment. We show that an adversary can design a low-overhead hard-to-detect Trojan that can leak either secret keys stored in a processor, the code running in it, or the data being processed.