Creating a Backscattering Side Channel to Enable Detection of Dormant Hardware Trojans

Abstract

This paper describes a new physical side channel, i.e., the backscattering side channel, created by transmitting a signal toward the integrated circuits (ICs), where the internal impedance changes caused by on-chip switching activity modulate the signal that is backscattered (reflected) from the IC. To demonstrate how this new side channel can be used to detect small changes in circuit impedances, we propose a new method for nondestructively detecting hardware Trojans (HTs) from outside the chip. We experimentally confirm, using measurements on one physical instance for training and nine other physical instances for testing, that the new side channel, when combined with an HT detection method, allows detection of a dormant HT in 100% of the HT-afflicted measurements for a number of different HTs while producing no false positives in HT-free measurements. Furthermore, additional experiments are conducted to compare the backscattering-based detection to one that uses the traditional EM-emanation-based side channel. These results show that backscattering-based detection outperforms the EM side channel, confirm that dormant HTs are much more difficult for detection than HTs that have been activated, and show how detection is affected by changing the HT’s size and physical location on the IC.