Detection of Hardware Trojans in SystemC HLS Designs via Coverage-guided Fuzzing*

Hoang M. Le1,a, Daniel Große1,2,b, Niklas Bruns2,d and Rolf Drechsler1,2,c
1Institute of Computer Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
ahle@informatik.uni-bremen.de
bgrosse@informatik.uni-bremen.de
cdrechsle@informatik.uni-bremen.de
2Cyber-Physical Systems, DFKI GmbH, Bremen, Germany
dNiklas.Bruns@dfki.de

ABSTRACT


High-level Synthesis (HLS) is being increasingly adopted as a mean to raise design productivity. HLS designs, which can be automatically translated into RTL, are typically written in SystemC at a more abstract level. Hardware Trojan attacks and countermeasures, while well-known and well-researched for RTL and below, have been only recently considered for HLS. The paper makes a contribution to this emerging research area by proposing a novel detection approach for Hardware Trojans in SystemC HLS designs. The proposed approach is based on coverage-guided fuzzing, a new promising idea from software (security) testing research. The efficiency of the approach in identifying stealthy behavior is demonstrated on a set of open-source benchmarks.



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