Hardware enlightening: No where to hide your Hardware Trojans!

Abstract

IC design and manufacturing chains show steadily growing complexity which provides different third party roles in between. Reprobate parties can take the opportunity to steal a client's IP or insert their malicious circuits-Hardware Trojans-in the original client's design and trigger them in case of need. Trojans are usually inserted in the most hidden internal signals with the lowest activity which increase their chance for not being activated and revealed by clients or end-users. In this paper we propose a method to reduce the number of signals with low activity and hence the chance of inserting hidden trojans. This method is based on an enhanced Logic Encryption approach and uses a 128-bit key. Encryption can also secure the design against IP piracy. Simulation results show that the proposed method can eliminate 83.17% of low activity signals in the circuit.