Hardware Trojan Protection for Third Party IPs

Abstract

Hardware Trojan detection is a very important topic especially as parts of critical systems which are designed and/or manufactured by untrusted third parties. Most of the current research concentrates on detecting Trojans at the testing phase by comparing the suspected circuit to a golden (trusted) one. However, these attempts do not work in the case of third party IPs, which are black boxes with no golden IPs to trust. In this work, we present novel methods for system protection that alleviate the need for a golden chip. Protection against injected Trojan is done using simple blockage method. We show the practicality of the introduced schemes by providing a proof of concept implementation of the proposed methodology on FPGA. We showed that the overhead is low enough in the simple blockage method. The delay overhead is negligible while the power overhead does not exceed 2%.