A System-On-Chip Bus Architecture for Thwarting Integrated Circuit Trojan Horses
Lok-Won Kim, John D. Villasenor · IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems · 2010
While the issue of Trojan ICs has been receiving increasing amounts of attention, the overwhelming majority of anti-Trojan measures aim to address the problem during verification. While such methods are an important part of an overall anti-Trojan strategy, it is statistically inevitable that some Trojans will escape verification-stage detection, in particular in light of the increasing size and complexity of system-on-chip (SoC) solutions and the increasing use of third-party designs. In contrast with much of the previous work in this area, we specifically focus on run-time methods to identify the attacks of a Trojan and to adapt the system and respond accordingly. We describe a solution including a bus architecture in which the arbitration, address decoding, multiplexing, wrapping, and other components protect against malicious use of the bus.