Runtime Hardware Trojan Detection by Reconfigurable Monitoring Circuits

The trustability of integrated circuits (ICs) has become a serious issue due to the outsourcing of IC manufacturing to third-party foundries. Given reports of IC tampering, extensive research activities have focused on finding appropriate solutions to prevent this issue. This paper proposes an approach to detect hardware Trojans using a design method for hardware security at runtime and during operation in the field. To this end, the operation of the circuit components is constantly monitored, and if there is a functionality violation for any reason, including an inserted hardware Trojan, it can be immediately detected and notified to the user. This is done by comparing the outputs of each part of the circuit that are prone to incorporate the Trojan’s payload by adversaries with the output of a circuit that imitates it. We show that by using this approach, we can find all of the Trojans that change the functionality of the attempted benchmarks even if they remain active for only a few nanoseconds. Besides, our approach does not need a golden chip and can be used for any type of digital chips.