2,889 research outputs found
Trojans in Early Design Steps—An Emerging Threat
Hardware Trojans inserted by malicious foundries
during integrated circuit manufacturing have received substantial
attention in recent years. In this paper, we focus on a different
type of hardware Trojan threats: attacks in the early steps of
design process. We show that third-party intellectual property
cores and CAD tools constitute realistic attack surfaces and that
even system specification can be targeted by adversaries. We
discuss the devastating damage potential of such attacks, the
applicable countermeasures against them and their deficiencies
Hardware Trojan Detection Using Controlled Circuit Aging
This paper reports a novel approach that uses transistor aging in an
integrated circuit (IC) to detect hardware Trojans. When a transistor is aged,
it results in delays along several paths of the IC. This increase in delay
results in timing violations that reveal as timing errors at the output of the
IC during its operation. We present experiments using aging-aware standard cell
libraries to illustrate the usefulness of the technique in detecting hardware
Trojans. Combining IC aging with over-clocking produces a pattern of bit errors
at the IC output by the induced timing violations. We use machine learning to
learn the bit error distribution at the output of a clean IC. We differentiate
the divergence in the pattern of bit errors because of a Trojan in the IC from
this baseline distribution. We simulate the golden IC and show robustness to
IC-to-IC manufacturing variations. The approach is effective and can detect a
Trojan even if we place it far off the critical paths. Results on benchmarks
from the Trust-hub show a detection accuracy of 99%.Comment: 21 pages, 34 figure
Runtime Detection of a Bandwidth Denial Attack from a Rogue Network-on-Chip
Chips with high computational power are the crux of today’s pervasive complex digital systems. Microprocessor circuits are evolving towards many core designs with the integration of hundreds of processing cores, memory elements and other devices on a single chip to sustain high performance computing while maintaining low design costs. Two decisive paradigm shifts in the semiconductor industry have made this evolution possible: (a) architectural and (b) organizational.
At the heart of the architectural innovation is a scalable high speed data communication structure, the network-on-chip (NoC). NoC is an interconnect network for the glueless integration of on-chip components in the modern complex communication centric designs. In the recent days, NoC has replaced the traditional bus based architecture owing to its structured and modular design, scalability and low design cost. The organizational revolution has resulted in a globalized and collaborative supply chain with pervasive use of third party intellectual properties to reduce the time-to-market and overall design costs.
Despite the advantages of these paradigm shifts, modern system-on-chips pose a plethora of security vulnerabilities. This work explores a threat model arising from a malicious NoC IP embedded with a hardware trojan affecting the resource availability of on-chip components. A rigorous simulation infrastructure is established to evaluate the feasibility and potency of such an attack. Further, a non-invasive runtime monitoring technique is proposed and thoroughly investigated to ensure the trustworthiness of a third party NoC IP with low overheads
Creation of backdoors in quantum communications via laser damage
Practical quantum communication (QC) protocols are assumed to be secure
provided implemented devices are properly characterized and all known side
channels are closed. We show that this is not always true. We demonstrate a
laser-damage attack capable of modifying device behaviour on-demand. We test it
on two practical QC systems for key distribution and coin-tossing, and show
that newly created deviations lead to side channels. This reveals that laser
damage is a potential security risk to existing QC systems, and necessitates
their testing to guarantee security.Comment: Changed the title to match the journal version. 9 pages, 5 figure
A Chip Architecture for Compressive Sensing Based Detection of IC Trojans
We present a chip architecture for a compressive sensing based method that can be used in conjunction with the JTAG standard to detect IC Trojans. The proposed architecture compresses chip output resulting from a large number of test vectors applied to a circuit under test (CUT). We describe our designs in sensing leakage power, computing random linear combinations under compressive sensing, and piggybacking these new functionalities on JTAG. Our architecture achieves approximately a 10Ă— speedup and 1000Ă— reduction in output bandwidth while incurring a small area overhead.Engineering and Applied Science
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