Cellular automata based solution for detecting hardware trojan in CMPs

Abstract

Nowadays, Hardware Trojan threats have become inevitable due to the growing complexities of Integrated Circuits (ICs) as well as the current trend of Intellectual Property (IP) based hardware designs. An adversary can insert a Hardware Trojan during any of its life cycle phases-during the design, fabrication or even manufacturing phase. Once a Trojan is inserted into a system, it can cause an unwanted modification to system functionality which may degrade system performance or sometimes Trojans are implanted with the target to leak secret information. Once Trojans are implanted, it is hard to detect and impossible to remove it from the system as it is already fabricated into the chip. In this paper, we propose a stealthy Trojan model which affect the coherence mechanism of a Chip Multiprocessors’ (CMPs) cache system by arbitrarily modifying the cache block state which in turn may leave the cache lines states as incoherent. We have evaluated the payload of such modelled Trojan and proposed a cellular automata (CA) based solution for detection of such Trojan.