A Novel Approach to Detect Hardware Trojan Attacks on Primary Data Inputs
Taimour Wehbe, Vincent John Mooney III, David C. Keezer, Nicholas B. Parham · 2015
Hardware security is an important component of any chip design intended for use by critical infrastructure or any scenario where a malicious party may want to cause trouble. A possible avenue of attack is to insert tiny Hardware Trojan (HT) logic at the primary data inputs which the attacker can trigger undetected. A detection architecture and approach is proposed where initial data generation from analog to digital values is coupled with generation of a unique signature prior to passing the data (and associated signature) for later processing. A specific situation of providing the data to a cipher chip motivates and demonstrates the approach which regenerates the signature in the cipher chip and compares against the signature input with the data; a mismatch indicates that there is a problem. The practical impact of the approach in foiling attacks by tiny HT logic can be further strengthened by the select use of reconfigurable logic for off-chip signature generation and on-chip comparison/test as the attacker can only place a small amount of HT logic and remain "tiny."