Quantitative Analysis of Information Leakage Hardware Trojans in IP Cores

Abstract

Computing hardware has attracted the attention of malicious attackers due to the globalization of hardware designs and supply chains and the integration of third-party intellectual property (IP) cores. The gate level information flow tracking (GLIFT) method has been proposed to detect information leakage hardware trojans by setting labels and detecting the propagation of labels. However, the existing researches focus on binary labels, which cannot quantify the leaked information and obtain the information leakage path. Therefore, we propose a precise multi-bit label tracking method. By detecting the propagation of the multi-bit labels, we can exactly understand which bits have leaked and the leaked paths. At the same time, in order to reduce the complexity of the multi-bit label propagation logic, we also propose an optimization method. Experiments show that our method can quantitatively analyze information leakage trojans in IP cores, and the optimization method can also reduce the complexity.