Design for Trust utilizing Rareness Reduction

TL;DR

This paper proposes a design-for-trust approach that reduces rareness in hardware signals to hinder Trojan concealment and enhance detection, emphasizing the link between area optimization and security.

Contribution

It introduces rareness reduction as a novel design strategy to improve hardware Trojan detection and analyzes how area optimization impacts security.

Findings

Area reduction decreases signal rareness.

Lower rareness accelerates Trojan detection.

Design diversity further reduces Trojan concealment.

Abstract

Increasing design complexity and reduced time-to-market have motivated manufacturers to outsource some parts of the System-on-Chip (SoC) design flow to third-party vendors. This provides an opportunity for attackers to introduce hardware Trojans by constructing stealthy triggers consisting of rare events (e.g., rare signals, states, and transitions). There are promising test generation-based hardware Trojan detection techniques that rely on the activation of rare events. In this paper, we investigate rareness reduction as a design-for-trust solution to make it harder for an adversary to hide Trojans (easier for Trojan detection). Specifically, we analyze different avenues to reduce the potential rare trigger cases, including design diversity and area optimization. While there is a good understanding of the relationship between area, power, energy, and performance, this research provides a better insight into the dependency between area and security. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that area reduction leads to a reduction in rareness. It also reveals that reducing rareness leads to faster Trojan detection as well as improved coverage by Trojan detection methods.