Dynamic Function Verification for System on Chip Security Against Hardware-Based Attacks

Abstract

As chip designs become increasingly complex, there is a corresponding increased vulnerability to malicious circuitry that could be inserted in the design process. Such hardware Trojans can be designed to avoid pre-deployment detection, and thus to potentially launch attacks that could impede the function of the system or compromise the integrity of the data it contains. Given the near impossibility of exhaustive detection of malicious hardware during pre-deployment verification, techniques that enable post-deployment hardware integrity verification can play a vital role in system security. In this paper, we propose a system architecture for performing online verification in a manner that does not impede normal system hardware function. The proposed approach provides a comprehensive architectural design method aimed at system on chip (SoC) based hardware systems that performs run-time testing, detects run-time attacks by Trojans, mitigates them, quarantines the detected malicious hardware modules, and regenerates the lost system functions with modest cost.