Propelling Innovation to Defeat Data-Leakage Hardware Trojans: From Theory to Practice

TL;DR

This paper introduces RECORD, a practical randomized encoding scheme for combinational logic, combined with Quilt Packaging, to prevent data leakage through hardware Trojans in untrusted fabrication environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel, practical scheme called RECORD that enhances hardware security against data leakage by using temporary randomized encoding and physical packaging techniques.

Findings

RECORD effectively prevents data interpretation by attackers.

The scheme is practical and applicable in real-world fabrication scenarios.

It enhances security against reverse engineering and side-channel attacks.

Abstract

Many design companies have gone fabless and rely on external fabrication facilities to produce chips due to increasing cost of semiconductor manufacturing. However, not all of these facilities can be considered trustworthy; some may inject hardware Trojans and jeopardize the security of the system. One common objective of hardware Trojans is to establish a side channel for data leakage. While extensive literature exists on various defensive measures, almost all of them focus on preventing the establishment of side channels, and can be compromised if attackers gain access to the physical chip and can perform reverse engineering between multiple fabrication runs. In this paper, we advance (from theory to practice) RECORD: Randomized Encoding of COmbinational Logic for Resistance to Data Leakage. RECORD is a novel scheme of temporarily randomized encoding for combinational logic that, with the aid of Quilt Packaging, prevents attackers from interpreting the data.