A Symbolic Approach to Detecting Hardware Trojans Triggered by Don't Care Transitions
Ruochen Dai, Tuba Yavuz

TL;DR
This paper introduces a symbolic, multi-stage method for detecting hardware Trojans triggered by don't care transitions in FSMs, applicable at RTL and gate-level, improving efficiency and accuracy without needing a golden design.
Contribution
It presents a novel approach that combines RTL and gate-level analysis, with a pruning technique, to efficiently detect Trojans exploiting don't care transitions in hardware designs.
Findings
Approach is up to 10X faster with pruning.
Achieves 0% false positives in Trojan detection.
Detection time improves up to 3.40X at RTL.
Abstract
Due to the globalization of Integrated Circuit (IC) supply chain, hardware trojans and the attacks that can trigger them have become an important security issue. One type of hardware Trojans leverages the don't care transitions in Finite State Machines (FSMs) of hardware designs. In this paper, we present a symbolic approach to detecting don't care transitions and the hidden Trojans. Our detection approach works at both RTL and gate-level, does not require a golden design, and works in three stages. In the first stage, it explores the reachable states. In the second stage, it performs an approximate analysis to find the don't care transitions. In the third stage, it performs a state-space exploration from reachable states that have incoming don't care transitions to find behavioral discrepancies with respect to what has been observed in the first stage. We also present a pruning…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPhysical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security · VLSI and Analog Circuit Testing · Security and Verification in Computing
