Temperature tracking: an innovative run-time approach for hardware Trojan detection

Abstract

The hardware Trojan threat has motivated development of Trojan detection schemes at all stages of the integrated circuit (IC) lifecycle. While the majority of existing schemes focus on ICs at test-time, there are many unique advantages offered by post-deployment/run-time Trojan detection. However, run-time approaches have been underutilized with prior work highlighting the challenges of implementing them with limited hardware resources. In this paper, we propose innovative low-overhead approaches for run-time Trojan detection which exploit the thermal sensors already available in many modern systems to detect deviations in power/thermal profiles caused by Trojan activation. Simulation results using state-of-the-art tools on publicly available Trojan benchmarks verify that our approaches can detect active Trojans quickly and with few false positives.