Trojan Insertions of Fully Programmable Valve Arrays

Fully programmable valve arrays (FPVAs) have emerged as a new technology commonly used for biochemical applications. FPVAs have the programmability to perform any bioassay as long as users obtain the fluidic-level synthesis results to configure the fluid loading. Users can purchase a bioassay and the corresponding synthesis result from any bioassay provider. However, the distributed design stages are vulnerable to security threats. Trojans are the most critical threats since they can be inserted in any design stage. Even worse, Trojans would not result in a significant deviation from the original synthesis results, while they can affect the bioassay execution dramatically. In this paper, we propose the six Trojan models for FPVAs and a systematic method for Trojan insertion. In the experiments, we insert Trojans into ten test cases. Most of the Trojan-inserted synthesis results are similar to Trojan-free ones in terms of the efficiency metrics. In other words, the experimental results show that the proposed Trojans for FPVAs are stealthy.