Detecting hardware Trojans in unspecified functionality using mutation testing
Nicole Fern, Kwang-Ting Tim Cheng · 2015
Existing functional Trojan detection methodologies assume Trojans violate the design specification under carefully crafted rare triggering conditions. We present a new type of Trojan that leaks secret information from the design by only modifying unspecified functionality, meaning the Trojan is no longer restricted to being active only under rare conditions. We provide a method based on mutation testing for detecting this new Trojan type along with mutant ranking heuristics to prioritize analysis of the most dangerous functionality. Applying our method to a UART controller design, we discover unspecified and untested bus functionality with the potential to leak 32 bits of information during hundreds of cycles without being detected! Our method also reveals poorly tested interrupt functionality with information leakage potential. After modifying the specification and test bench to remove the discovered vulnerabilities, we close the verification loop by re-analyzing the design using our methodology and observe the functionality is no longer flagged as dangerous.