On-Chip Magnetic Probes for Hardware Trojan Prevention and Detection

Abstract

Security threats due to Hardware Trojans are growing in volume and variety. The miniature size of Trojans coupled with their diversity and their unpredictable effects made them difficult to detect. Researchers have proposed different techniques to either prevent the insertion of Hardware Trojans or detect them at early stages. In this article, a new tamper resilient solution is presented to capture the electromagnetic signature of integrated circuits to ensure their security. In the proposed method, the remaining metal and polysilicon layers are fully utilized as internal magnetic probes to monitor the signature of the device and in the meantime deprive attackers of layout resources to route Hardware Trojans. 3-D full-wave electromagnetic field simulations using high-frequency structural simulator show that tampering with a chip to insert a minimally invasive Trojan of 12 μm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , the area required to insert an inverter, can be detected through the magnetic signature.