AXI Interconnect Architecture Improvement for Thwarting Hardware Trojan Horses
Zhen Xie, Xinning Liu, Zhuang Zhang · International Conference on Electric Information and Control Engineering · 2012
More complicated modules have been integrated into the system-on-chip (SoC), some of which are provided by third parties, besides the implementation of SoC is commonly out of designers' control, the issue of hardware Trojan horses has been receiving increasing amounts of attention. In contrast with most of previous solutions, which involve measurements of physical characteristics during verification, a run-time method to address the problem is proposed in this paper. Improved interconnect architecture is presented to identify and isolate Trojan horses, preventing system from malicious accesses. An experimental sys-tem with improved AXI interconnect architecture is designed and implemented, in which some types of Trojans are implanted. The improvement thwarts Trojan horses successfully, guaranteeing safety and security of system with little effect on system performance.