TrojanGuard

Abstract

Hardware Trojans are a major concern due to the damage caused by their stealth. One popular utilization of Multiprocessor System on Chips (MPSoCs) is the Pipelined MPSoC (PMPSoC) architectures. They are used in applications from video surveillance to consumer electronics. We present a method that detects the presence of Trojans in third party IP cores of PMPSoCs, by continuous monitoring and testing, and recovers by switching the infected core with another core. We implemented the system on a commercial cycle accurate multiprocessor simulation environment. Our system incurs about 2x area and leakage power, and 1.5x dynamic power overheads, without any adverse impact on throughput compared to the state of the art that uses Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) and therefore incurs at least 3x overhead.