ZDD: A Zero Delay Deviation Variability-Aware Golden Free Hardware Trojan Detection Using Physical Unclonable Function
Fakir Sharif Hossain, Ashek Seum, Md. Reasad Zaman Chowdhury, Foisal Ahmed · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I Regular Papers · 2025
Hardware Trojan detection through side-channel analysis in physical chips is very challenging due to the presence of manufacturing process variations. Numerous Trojan detection approaches are in the literature. However, most of them are limited to netlist level identification and unable to explain the process variation issue in post-silicon chips. In this work, we propose a new detection technique with delay side-channel analysis that can detect all types of Trojans under the presence of high process variations. The technique is termed as zero delay deviation (ZDD) that is capable of diminishing the effect of all variations and other noise sources to identify the Trojan presence in chips. The ZDD approach is achieved by 1) a novel equal-delay circuit partitioning, 2) placing a highly secured camouflaged ring oscillator PUF per partition to generate equal-delay challenge-response pairs that delivers the knowledge of variation trends, 3) generating Identical Delay (ID) neighboring pairs for both, partitions and PUF designs that ensure nullifying the variation effects upon comparing them. The ZDD is examined through an intra-referencing of ID pairs with PUF-RD pairs in ISCAS’85 and 89 benchmarks. 10,000 virtual chips are generated by Monte Carlo simulation considering all physical characteristics of a real chip. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach can successfully detect Trojans even if it consists of a single gate. A comparison to the state-of-the-art shows the method superiority over others.