Sensitivity analysis to hardware Trojans using power supply transient signals

Abstract

Trust in reference to integrated circuits addresses the concern that the design and/or fabrication of the IC may be purposely altered by an adversary. The insertion of a hardware Trojan involves a deliberate and malicious change to an IC that adds or removes functionality or reduces its reliability. Trojans are designed to disable and/or destroy the IC at some future time or they may serve to leak confidential information covertly to the adversary. Trojans are cleverly hidden by the adversary to make it extremely difficult for chip validation processes, such as manufacturing test, to accidentally discover them. This paper investigates a power supply transient signal analysis method for detecting Trojans that is based on the analysis of multiple power port signals. In particular, we focus on determining the smallest detectable Trojan in a set of process simulation models that characterize a TSMC 0.18 um process.