Homomorphic Data Isolation for Hardware Trojan Protection

TL;DR

This paper proposes homomorphic encryption-based hardware designs for protecting against hardware Trojans, demonstrating resource-efficient FPGA implementations with significant area and power savings.

Contribution

It introduces two partial homomorphic encryption designs on FPGA for Trojan protection and a resource-sharing dual-circuit approach to optimize area and power consumption.

Findings

Dual-circuit design reduces logic resources by 35%

Power consumption decreases by 20%

Design maintains similar cycle count as non-shared implementations

Abstract

The interest in homomorphic encryption/decryption is increasing due to its excellent security properties and operating facilities. It allows operating on data without revealing its content. In this work, we suggest using homomorphism for Hardware Trojan protection. We implement two partial homomorphic designs based on ElGamal encryption/decryption scheme. The first design is a multiplicative homomorphic, whereas the second one is an additive homomorphic. We implement the proposed designs on a low-cost Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA. Area utilization, delay, and power consumption are reported for both designs. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-circuit design that combines the two earlier designs using resource sharing in order to have minimum area cost. Experimental results show that our dual-circuit design saves 35% of the logic resources compared to a regular design without resource sharing. The saving in power consumption is 20%, whereas the number of cycles needed remains almost the same