An Automated Configurable Trojan Insertion Framework for Dynamic Trust Benchmarks
Jonathan Cruz, Yuanwen Huang, Prabhat Mishra and Swarup Bhunia
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
ABSTRACT
Malicious hardware modification, also known as hardware Trojan attack, has emerged as a serious security concern for electronic systems. Such attacks compromise the basic premise of hardware root of trust. Over the past decade, significant research efforts have been directed to carefully analyze the trust issues arising from hardware Trojans and to protect against them. This vast body of work often needs to rely on well‐defined set of trust benchmarks that can reliably evaluate the effectiveness of the protection methods. In recent past, efforts have been made to develop a benchmark suite to analyze the effectiveness of pre‐silicon Trojan detection and prevention methodologies. However, there are only a limited number of Trojan inserted benchmarks available. Moreover, there is an inherent bias as the researcher is aware of Trojan properties such as location and trigger condition since the current benchmarks are static. In order to create an unbiased and robust benchmark suite to evaluate the effectiveness of any protection technique, we have developed a comprehensive framework of automatic hardware Trojan insertion. Given a netlist, the framework will automatically generate a design with single or multiple Trojan instances based user‐specified Trojan properties. It allows a wide variety of configurations, such as the type of Trojan, Trojan activation probability, number of triggers, and choice of payload. The tool ensures that the inserted Trojan is a valid one and allow for provisions to optimize the Trojan footprint (area and switching). Experiments demonstrate that a state‐ofthe‐ art Trojan detection technique provides poor efficacy when using benchmarks generated by our tool. This tool is available for download from http://www.trust-hub.org/.
