Synthesis of Hardware Sandboxes for Trojan Mitigation in Systems on Chip

In this work, we propose a high-level synthesis approach for hardware sandboxes in system-on-chip. Using interface formalism to capture interactions between non-trusted IPs and trusted parts of a system on chip, along with the properties specification language to specify non-authorized actions of non-trusted IPs, sandboxes are generated and made ready for inclusion as IP in a system-on-chip design. The concepts of composition, compatibility, and refinement are used to capture illegal actions and optimize resources across the boundary of single IPs. We have designed a tool that automatically generates the sandbox and facilitates their integration into system-on-chip. Our approach was validated with benchmarks from trust-hub.com and FPGA implementations. All our results showed 100% Trojan detection and mitigation, with only a minimal increase in resource overhead and no performance decrease.