Design, Implementation and Detection of Hardware Trojans in Sequential systems

Abstract

For decades, digital systems have been designed based on assumptions that the underlying hardware, though not perfectly reliable, is free of malicious elements. The demand for IC’s is greatly increasing due to tremendous technological development. Without appropriate resources the companies are hard pressed to produce trusted IC’s. This is driving the companies into the ‘fabless’ trend predominant in semi-conductor industry, where the companies are depending on cheaper foundries for the IC fabrication instead of depending on their own resources. This growth brings with it a big rise in threat level in terms of Hardware Trojans that hits the manufacturing companies which make use of Integrated Circuits. This transcends many industries, including strategic organizations and telecommunication companies, mobile phones and computers, embedded systems used in domestic applications and health care equipment. These adversarial inclusions are generally triggered to do malicious modifications in the end user system by the intruder, which is difficult to detect in their quiescent state. This paper focuses on understanding Hardware Trojans, their implications and detection methodologies. It is extremely important for all industries and more so for defense organizations, who are involved in developing systems to protect the nation’s boundaries.