Holistic hardware Trojan design of trigger and payload at gate level with rare switching signals eliminated

Abstract

A unified trigger and payload design scheme was proposed and re-convergent logic was introduced to eliminate rare transition signals which may be taken as suspicious signals in existing Trojan detections. Two Trojan structure templates were proposed and they could be applied to both privilege promotion and deny-of-service attacks. By combining these two structures in different proportion and position, a Trojan benchmark generation algorithm was proposed in which Trojan variations were resistant to feature analysis based detections. The proposed Trojans can obtain a very low activation probability using only primary inputs, which can reduce the restriction on primary trigger signals. So the Trojans will have better operability and adaptability in Trojan insertion. Then we discussed the method to keep concealed in fault diagnostic. At last, we made a comparison between the proposed Trojans and the state-of-the-art Trojan benchmarks on structural and logical features.