Test Pattern Superposition to Detect Hardware Trojans
Chris Nigha and Alex Orailoglub
Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California
achnigh@cs.ucsd.edu
balex@cs.ucsd.edu
ABSTRACT
Current methods for the detection of hardware Trojans inserted by an untrusted foundry are either accompanied by unreasonable costs in design/test pattern overhead, or return results that fail to provide confident trustability. The challenges faced by these side-channel techniques are primarily a result of process variation, which renders pre-silicon expectations nearly meaningless in predicting the behavior of a manufactured IC. To overcome this hindrance in a cost-effective manner, we propose an easy-to-implement test pattern-based approach that is selfreferential in nature, capable of dissecting and understanding the characteristics of a given manufactured IC to hone in on aberrant measurements that are demonstrative of malicious Trojan hardware. By leveraging the superposition principle to cancel out non-Trojan noise, we can isolate and magnify Trojan circuit effects, all within a regime considerate of practical test and design-for-test infrastructures. Experimental results performed on Trust-Hub benchmarks demonstrate the proposed method provides a clear and significant boost in our ability to confidently certify manufactured ICs over similar state-of-the-art techniques.
