Hard to Detect Combinational Hardware Trojans
Nilanjana Das, Mousumi Saha, Biplab Kumar Sikdar · 2018
Hardware Trojan (HT), caused by outsiders, modifies fabrication of a golden IC and avoids normal testing. The alteration by an HT targets disabling the main function of the IC or degrades signal integrity. Most vulnerable HTs are even designed to break hardware security. This work explores possible combinational trojan circuits, vulnerable to hardware design. It focuses on trigger and payload functions of HTs. The identified malicious hardwares are the tightly distributed large size functional type trojan, where activation is done via data, instruction or interrupt, that fall in internally activated trojan category. The detection probability of such HTs is low in comparison to the combinational HTs proposed in the literature.