A Board-level Hardware Trojan Detection Method
Yang Zhang, Jian Wang, Zhao-Rui Yang · 2024
Board-level hardware Trojan is a malicious modification on the Printed Circuit Board (PCB). It may lead the victim device to denial of service or leak confidential information. As recently studied, hardware Trojan greatly challenges the security of PCB. To tackle this issue, we propose a board-level hardware Trojan detection method that can distinguish the Trojan-infected PCBs from Trojan-free ones without a golden model, meanwhile, locate the Trojans on the infected board. First, we obtain all the thermal conductivity maps for a group of unauthentic PCBs. For each position of the map, we construct a feature matrix which involves the thermal conductivity values at the same position of all the boards. After that, we apply the DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) algorithm on each feature matrix to find the Trojan-infected PCBs. Finally, according to the clustering results, we locate the Trojan position on the infected boards. The experimental results on the well-recognized PCBench reveal that our method is effective. In general, the detection accuracy achieves up to 96.3% and the location error is less than 2.2%, even though the Trojan is as small as 3.9 mm2.