Brain-Inspired Golden Chip Free Hardware Trojan Detection

Abstract

Since 2007, the use of side-channel measurements for detecting Hardware Trojan (HT) has been extensively studied. However, the majority of works either rely on a golden chip, or they rely on methods that are not robust against subtle acceptable changes that would occur over the life-cycle of an integrated circuit (IC). In this paper, we propose using a brain-inspired architecture called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) for HT detection. Similar to the human brain, our proposed solution is resilient against <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">natural</i> changes that might happen in the side-channel measurements while being able to accurately detect abnormal behavior of the chip when the HT gets triggered. We use a self-referencing method for HT detection, which eliminates the need for the golden chip. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated using TrustHub benchmarks, which shows 92.20% detection accuracy on average.