Hardware Trojan detection acceleration based on word-level statistical properties management

Abstract

Hardware Trojan insertion has raised serious concerns to semiconductor industry and government agencies. Hardware Trojan is usually activated under rare conditions associated with low transition bits in a circuit. The damage includes circuit functional failure or important information leakage. Previous research on hardware Trojan detection is mainly based on side-channel analysis and Trojan activation. Long activation time is a major concern during the detection process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for efficiently accelerating Trojan activation by increasing the transition activity of rare bits. In particular, the proposed approach increases the bit-level transition activity by controlling signal word-level statistical properties, such as changing the variance and autocorrelation of the signal. In addition, by analyzing the signal propagation statistical properties through various digital signal processing (DSP) operators such as adders and multipliers, the proposed approach can control the statistical properties of internal signals and then enhance the internal bit transition activity from the primary input of the circuit. The proposed approach is evaluated on several circuits. The results show that the transition activity of rare bits can be dramatically increased by up to 166.7 times and Trojan activation time can be reduced by up to 121 times.