Efficient Test Generation for Trojan Detection using Side Channel Analysis

Yangdi Lyu and Prabhat Mishra
University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA

ABSTRACT


Detection of hardware Trojans is vital to ensure the security and trustworthiness of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. Side-channel analysis is effective for Trojan detection by analyzing various side-channel signatures such as power, current and delay. In this paper, we propose an efficient test generation technique to facilitate side-channel analysis utilizing dynamic current. While early work on current-aware test generation has proposed several promising ideas, there are two major challenges in applying it on large designs: (i) the test generation time grows exponentially with the design complexity, and (ii) it is infeasible to detect Trojans since the side-channel sensitivity is marginal compared to the noise and process variations. Our proposed work addresses both challenges by effectively exploiting the affinity between the inputs and rare (suspicious) nodes. We formalize the test generation problem as a searching problem and solve the optimization using genetic algorithm. The basic idea is to quickly find the profitable test patterns that can maximize switching in the suspicious regions while minimize switching in the rest of the circuit. Our experimental results demonstrate that we can drastically improve both the side-channel sensitivity (30x on average) and time complexity (4.6x on average) compared to the state-of-the-art test generation techniques.



Full Text (PDF)