Physical hardware trojan failure analysis and detection method

Abstract

The semiconductor industry is rapidly developing in the global market, and chip design companies usually purchase the third-party EDA tools in order to shorten the design cycle of IC and reduce manufacturing cost. Therefore, in the IC chip production procedure there exist a lot of insecurity factors, and the hardware security of IC chips becomes the most important issue of the national security defense. Physical hardware trojan will modify the value of register, leak sensitive data and cause device degradation failure. Furthermore, the physical hardware trojans only modify the physical properties of the circuit chip rather than injects the malicious functional circuit. They are hidden more deeply than logical hardware trojans. Therefore, it is far-reaching significance issues for the hardware trojan detection methods and national security to study logic circuit transmission characteristics and the chip degradation failure physical mechanism which are caused by injection physical hardware trojans. In this paper, a metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) device with injection dopant hardware trojan is realized by using ATHENA process simulation system to achieve the ion implantation process. The ATLAS simulation devices are tested using hot carrier injection degradation (hot carrier degradation is denoted by HCD) stress model for the degradation failure process which is caused by injecting the hot carrier injection hardware trojan (HCHT) into the MOSFET device. Another normal MOSFET combines with dopant hardware trojan MOSFET or hot carrier injection hardware trojan MOSFET to comprise the same inverter logic circuit by using the ATLAS two-dimensional (2D) device simulation system with SmartSpice instructions mode. The effect on logic circuit output characteristics caused by physical hardware trojan is studied by using Spice simulation to output the DC and AC transient time characteristics. It is also studied how the W/L value of a hardware trojan transistor influences the output characteristics of the logic circuit. We design an experiment to study transient characteristics of the same inverter logic module which consists of different W/L values of a transistor at different temperatures. The experiment is realized by Spice circuit simulation. In this paper, the effects of the variations of the HCD stress intensity and temperature on output characteristic are analyzed for hot carrier injection hardware trojan. The results indicate that the negative effect of hardware trojan on logic circuit DC current output characteristic is more obvious than AC transient time characteristic. Thus, we propose an effective method and a convenient procedure to detect the injection physical hardware trojan in packaged chips. Furthermore, the test process is a feasible operation method of detecting physical hardware trojan.