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A Non-Reversible Insertion Method for Hardware Trojans Based on Path Delay Faults

18 pagesPublished: September 10, 2018

Abstract

This paper presents a non-reversible method for stealthily inserting hardware Tro- jan (HT) based on a path delay fault called Path Delay HT (PDHT). While PDHT is hardly detected by the conventional methods including Monte-Carlo tests, its practicality is still unclear because a rarely sensitized path used for PDHT is selected and exploited in a deterministic manner. Such deterministic method indicates that we can find possible PDHT-inserted paths by its reversed method. In addition, the conventional method uses a genetic algorithm to add extra delays onto the selected path for inducing a path delay fault, and therefore, we have a difficulty in evaluating the resistance/vulnerability of a circuit to PDHT. This paper first presents a new method for selecting sufficiently rare paths to insert PDHT at random. We then show that the detectability/stealthiness of PDHT is related to switching activity (i.e., glitch effect), and present a new systematic method for inducing a path delay fault instead of GA. We demonstrate through an experimental PDHT-insertion and a Monte-Carlo test that the PDHT inserted by our method is sufficiently undetectable in comparison with the conventional method.

Keyphrases: bug attacks, hardware trojans, path delay faults, public key cryptographic hardware

In: Lejla Batina, Ulrich Kühne and Nele Mentens (editors). PROOFS 2018. 7th International Workshop on Security Proofs for Embedded Systems, vol 7, pages 50-67.

BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{PROOFS2018:Non_Reversible_Insertion_Method,
  author    = {Akira Ito and Rei Ueno and Naofumi Homma and Takafumi Aoki},
  title     = {A Non-Reversible Insertion Method for Hardware Trojans Based on Path Delay Faults},
  booktitle = {PROOFS 2018. 7th International Workshop on Security Proofs for Embedded Systems},
  editor    = {Lejla Batina and Ulrich Kühne and Nele Mentens},
  series    = {Kalpa Publications in Computing},
  volume    = {7},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2515-1762},
  url       = {/publications/paper/ZbpT},
  doi       = {10.29007/fxvv},
  pages     = {50-67},
  year      = {2018}}
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