Sensitivity analysis of ring oscillator based hardware Trojan detection

Abstract

With the rapid development of Integrated Circuit (IC) technology, more and more attentions are paid to chip security issues. As Hardware Trojan horse becomes a great potential threat to the IC industry, researches have been done on Trojan detection methods. Recently, Ring Oscillator Network (RON) detection structure has been proposed to precisely detect the Hardware Trojan. And we find the detection accuracy of RON detection method is affected by Trojan circuit logic gate switching frequency. In this paper, we analyze the impact of Hardware Trojan activity on ring oscillator frequency. A Hardware Trojan is used to study the detection sensitivity of RON detection structure at different Trojan gate switching frequencies. Result shows the Hardware Trojan gate switching noise has a spatial influence on the frequency of RO array. Especially we find that too low Trojan gate switching frequency will make the RON detection unsuccessful.