Hardware Trojans in Microfluidic Biochips
Dilip Kumar Dalei, Debasis Gountia · 2022
A hardware Trojan (HT) is defined as a malicious component that is intentionally placed inside an IC to carry out harmful activity. HTs are basically modeled to secretly tweak the original circuit to modify the desired functionality. Normally, these get activated on the event of unpredictable inputs or trigger conditions. The activation of the Trojan may stop the normal operation of the chip or create a backdoor to leak confidential information. HTs can be differentiated based on their size, complexity, lethality, etc. Researchers have proposed numerous detection techniques to identify Trojan-affected chips. The form and complexity of these methods solely depend on the type of targeted HT. Each method has its own merits and demerits, depending on factors such as basic principle, cost, reliability, etc. Microfluidic biochips are an emerging branch of lab-on-chip (LoC) technology in biochemistry and molecular biology. These biochips help to integrate conventional procedures in bio-chemical analysis onto a single chip. So, it has a wide market application in the areas of clinical trials, drug therapy, DNA sequencing, etc. A biochip is a miniaturized device similar to an electronic chip that is used to analyze organic molecules associated with living organisms. It is specially designed for functioning in a biological setup, especially inside living organisms. A biochip consists of millions of biosensors, which acts as micro reactors used for detecting particular analytes such as an enzyme, protein, biological molecule, and antibody. Like silicon chips, biochips are also vulnerable to hardware Trojans attacks. It is of great importance to protect and detect HTs present in biochips. The current chapter explores the possibility of HTs in biochips and the available counter mechanisms along with future scopes which should be carried out before any attacks jeopardize the worlds of health care, and the biological and biochemical industries.