Red team: Design of intelligent hardware trojans with known defense schemes

Abstract

In the past few years, several Trojan detection approaches have been developed to prevent the damages caused by Trojans, making Trojan insertion more and more difficult. As part of the Embedded Systems Challenge (ESC), we were given two different designs with two different Trojan detection methods, and we tried to design Trojans which could avoid detection. We developed Trojans that remain undetectable by the delay fingerprinting and ring-oscillator monitoring Trojan detection methods embedded into these benchmarks. Experimental results on a Xilinx FPGA demonstrate that most of our hardware Trojans were undetected using the inserted detection mechanisms.