LAOCOÖN: A Run-Time Monitoring and Verification Approach for Hardware Trojan Detection

Abstract

Hardware Trojan Horses and active fault attacks are a threat to the safety and security of electronic systems. By such manipulations, an attacker can extract sensitive information or disturb the functionality of a device. Therefore, several protections against malicious inclusions have been devised in recent years. A prominent technique to detect abnormal behavior in the field is run-time verification. It relies on dedicated monitoring circuits and on verification rules generated from a set of temporal properties. An important question when dealing with such protections is the effectiveness of the protection against unknown attacks. In this paper, we present a methodology based on automatic generation of monitoring and formal verification techniques that can be used to validate and analyze the quality of a set of temporal properties when used as protection against generic attackers of variable strengths.