Experiences in Hardware Trojan Design and Implementation

Abstract-- We report our experiences in designing and implementing several hardware Trojans within the framework of the Embedded System Challenge competition that was held as part of the Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in October 2008. Due to the globalization of the Integrated Circuit (IC) manufacturing industry, hardware Trojans constitute an increasingly probable threat to both commercial and military applications. With traditional testing methods falling short in the quest of finding hardware Trojans, several specialized detection methods have surfaced. To facilitate research in this area, a better understanding of what Hardware Trojans would look like and what impact they would incur to an IC is required. To this end, we present eight distinct attack techniques employing Register Transfer Level (RTL) hardware Trojans to compromise the security of an Alpha encryption module implemented on a Digilent BASYS Spartan-3 FPGA board...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: HOST
• Authors: Yier Jin, Nathan Kupp, Yiorgos Makris
• Keywords: Cyber Security Awareness, Hardware Trojans, HOST 2009, Security Privacy, System Challenge Competition