Hardware Trojan by Hot Carrier Injection

TL;DR

This paper explores how hot carrier injection (HCI) can be exploited to create hardware trojans that cause failures through gradual transistor degradation, highlighting detection challenges and potential malicious scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hardware trojan concept based on controlled HCI effects, emphasizing its stealthy nature and detection difficulties.

Findings

HCI can be exploited to induce hardware failures gradually.

Detection of HCI-based trojans is challenging due to slow degradation.

Various scenarios can intentionally accelerate HCI effects in chips.

Abstract

This paper discusses how hot carrier injection (HCI) can be exploited to create a trojan that will cause hardware failures. The trojan is produced not via additional logic circuitry but by controlled scenarios that maximize and accelerate the HCI effect in transistors. These scenarios range from manipulating the manufacturing process to varying the internal voltage distribution. This new type of trojan is difficult to test due to its gradual hardware degradation mechanism. This paper describes the HCI effect, detection techniques and discusses the possibility for maliciously induced HCI trojans.