Design of hardware trojan horse based on counter

Abstract

With globalization of the semiconductor design and fabrication process, hardware Trojan has become a new threat which risks to the security of integrated circuit. An adversary can design a Trojan to destroy a system or leak confidential information which is difficult for chip validation processes, such as manufacturing test, to detect. To facilitate research in this area, a better understanding of what Hardware Trojans would look like and what impact they would incur to a circuit is required. In this paper, a counter-based hardware Trojan horse within 8 LED marquee circuit is designed and implemented. First, a counter-based Trojan is designed and simulated functionally by ModelSim SE 6.2b. It is difficult to be activated and detected using random stimuli. Next, a marquee circuit is designed in Verilog HDL, which is used as a target circuit to implement and analyze the hardware Trojan. Marquee circuit was simulated by simulation tool, and implemented on a Spartan-3E Starter Kit Board. To this end, we insert the counter-based hardware Trojan into the marquee circuit to implement on a Spartan-3E Starter Kit Board. The experiment's result shows that this type of the hardware Trojan is very flexible, it can be easily embedded in the target circuit and not easily found.