Real-time trust evaluation in integrated circuits

Abstract

The use of side-channel measurements and fingerprinting, in conjunction with statistical analysis, has proven to be the most effective method for accurately detecting hardware Trojans in fabricated integrated circuits. However, these postfabrication trust evaluation methods overlook the capabilities of advanced design skills that attackers can use in designing sophisticated Trojans. To this end, we have designed a Trojan using power-gating techniques and demonstrate that it can be masked from advanced side-channel fingerprinting detection while dormant. We then propose a real-time trust evaluation framework that continuously monitors the on-board global power consumption to monitor chip trustworthiness. The measurements obtained corroborate our frameworks effectiveness for detecting Trojans. Finally, the results presented are experimentally verified by performing measurements on fabricated Trojan-free and Trojan-infected variants of a reconfigurable linear feedback shift register (LFSR) array.

Introduction to Hardware Security

“…• hardware Trojans, similar to the progression seen in modern circuit design, can utilize advanced design techniques to improve inconspicuousness without sacrificing functionality [40,42]; • enhanced Trojan designs can use significant chip space and still remain hidden with respect to the overall side-channel profile [52]; • golden models are not always available for integrated systems containing 3rd-party resources [41,53]; • analog/RF circuits are equally vulnerable to hardware Trojan attacks [48,54,55].…”

“…However, this trusted evaluation process has the limitation that it will only be triggered externally through primary inputs halting the normal operation and leaving plenty of time for attackers to trigger and mute the Trojans during the testing intervals. To overcome the shortage of this method, a real-time trust evaluation structure is proposed that can constantly monitor the operational status of the target circuit and report circuit abnormalities instantly [52]. Concurrent on-chip parity checking leveraging on resistive RAM is also developed for run-time hardware Trojan detection.…”

Design of security primitives for trustworthy integrated circuits

“…As the Trojans can be serious threats to all systems and sectors that are dependent on electronic devices, prevention and detection of hardware Trojans have drawn a significant interest not only in academia, but also in governmental agencies and industry. Many HT detection techniques have been reported [4,6,17,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] in recent years. These different techniques are explained and compared with respect to their capabilities and limitations in this section.…”

“…The Trojan can be triggered only after the counter has run for a much longer time than any standard test time. In[31], a power-gated Trojan has been demonstrated to be able to bypass the power-based side-channel signal analysis. However, to realize the triggering mechanism, the inputs of the Trojan are connected to some existing logic nodes of the original design.…”

“…normal circuit timing and functionality, it can be incorporated into the real-time trust evaluation framework[31] to monitor the active current timing and duration in the field. When an HT is activated during normal circuit operation, the measured characteristics of the power trace will change dramatically to alert for anomalies.…”