Chapter 6
Hardware Trojan Detection
Hardware Trojan (HT) is increasingly becoming a major threat that risks the security of modern Integrated Circuits (ICs). An adversary can intentionally make some modifications to the IC design with an objective to cause operational failure, denial of service or to leak sensitive information from the IC. Unfortunately, an attacker can easily add hardware Trojan into Integrated Circuits. Since hardware Trojans are tiny and invisible compared to the size of the original circuit, their detection is quite hard. This chapter first introduces the concept of hardware Trojan detection and present representative techniques at different phases. The chapter then presents a hands-on experiment for showcasing hardware Trojan detection in a cryptographic engine, i.e., advanced encryption standard (AES), using commercial formal verification tools at the register transfer level (RTL). By creating security properties based on the specification of the AES implementation, the counter example violating the security property will explicitly point out the trigger pattern activating the inserted Trojan.