Programmable assertion checkers for hardware Trojan detection

Abstract

Due to the increase in design complexity and cost of VLSI chips, a number of design houses outsource manufacturing and import designs in a way to reduce the cost. This results in a decrease of the authenticity and security of the manufactured product. Since product development involves outside sources, circuit designers can not guarantee that their hardware has not been altered. It is often possible that attackers include additional hardware in order to gain privileges over the original circuit or cause damage to the product. These added circuits are called “Hardware Trojans”. In this paper, we investigate introducing necessary modules needed for detection of hardware Trojans. We also introduce necessary programmable logic fabric that can be used in the implementation of the hardware assertion checkers. Our target is to utilize the provided programable fabric in a System on Chip (SoC) and optimize the hardware assertion to cover the detection of most hardware trojans in each core of the target SoC.