Selective Concolic Testing for Hardware Trojan Detection in Behavioral SystemC Designs

Abstract

With the growing complexities of modern SoC designs and increasingly shortened time-to-market requirements, new design paradigms such as outsourced design services have emerged. Design abstraction level has also been raised from RTL to ESL. Modern SoC designs in ESL often integrate a variety of third-party behavioral intellectual properties, as well as intensively utilizing EDA tools to improve design productivity. However, this new design trend makes modern SoCs more vulnerable to hardware Trojan attacks. Although hardware Trojan detection has been studied for more than a decade in RTL and lower levels, it has only recently gained attention in ESL designs. In this paper, we present a novel approach for generating test cases by selective concolic testing to detect hardware Trojans in ESL. We have evaluated our approach on an open source benchmark that includes various types of hardware Trojans. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach is able to detect hardware Trojans effectively and efficiently.