The economics of hardware trojans: An expert’s opinion
A. R. Tripathi · Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research · 2020
The US-China face-off over allegations of Huawei’s equipment being compromised has brought the subtle art of hardware trojan warfare right into the open spotlight. This paper focuses on cyberattacks at the root of trust – IT hardware trojans (HT), primarily the most malicious of these trojans, the one which is surreptitiously implanted inside a semiconductor System on Chip (SoC) or Integrated Circuit (IC) for sabotage. Though a thoroughbred trojan of this kind is yet to be found in the wild, hardware trojans continue to shape public policies and fund technical research on their possibilities, detection and avoidance. This paper explores a highly under-researched area, the economics of real hardware trojans, including examples from the Syrian radar breach to iPhone trojans sold on Amazon.com.