Golden reference matching for gate-level netlist functionality identification
Thao Thanh Le, Jia Di · 2017
Outsourcing designs to 3rdparty vendors is a common practice in the integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing industry. This outsourcing brings advantages such as lower manufacturing cost and shorter time-to-market for a new system, which at the same time raises security threats in the IPs from 3rdparty vendors. These IPs may contain hardware Trojans capable of compromising the product's confidentiality, integrity, and/or availability. While prior work of the golden reference matching method focuses on RTL designs, this paper introduces a framework of golden reference matching for gate-level netlists. Promising results have been achieved on several benchmark circuits in functionality matching, which leads to various ways in detecting inserted Trojans.