Electromagnetic circuit fingerprints for Hardware Trojan detection

Abstract

Integrated circuit counterfeits, relabeled parts and maliciously modified integrated circuits (so-called Hardware Trojan horses) are a recognized emerging threat for embedded systems in safety or security critical applications. We propose a Hardware Trojan detection technique based on fingerprinting the electromagnetic emanations of integrated circuits. In contrast to most previous work, we do not evaluate our proposal using simulations but we rather conduct experiments with an FPGA. We investigate the effectiveness of our technique in detecting extremely small Hardware Trojans located at different positions within the FPGA. In addition, we also study its robustness to the often neglected issue of variations in the test environment. The results show that our method is able to detect most of our test Hardware Trojans but also highlight the difficulty of measuring emanations of unrealistically tiny Hardware Trojans. The results also confirm that our method is sensitive to changes in the test environment.