Revisiting Black-Hat HLS: A Lightweight Countermeasure to HLS-Aided Trojan Attack

Abstract

One of the dark side of horizontal semiconductor business model could be the supply of compromised computer-aided design (CAD) tools by an adversary to the designers. A compromised or black-hat high-level synthesis (HLS) tool may secretly insert Trojan into the design being synthesized to affect its functional or nonfunctional aspects. Recently, a black-hat HLS was presented which inserts fake operations during the scheduling process to enable battery exhaustion attack. In this letter, we present a framework to detect the fake operations inserted by a compromised HLS with the help of scheduling information provided by the tool. We implemented our detection framework on a number of benchmarks and analyzed the detection time and accuracy. We also analyzed the cost of fake operation insertion in terms of design area and delay overhead.