A Low-cost Hardware Trojan Mitigation Method for Securing Untrusted ThirdParty Cryptographic Intellectual Property Cores

Abstract

Background/Objectives: This paperproposes a methodfor curtailing the effects of hardware Trojans in cryptographic third-party intellectual property (3PIP) cores without having access to the internal circuitry of the cores.

Methods/Statistical analysis: The proposed method obscures inputs to the 3PIP core and detects suspicious outputs thereby preventing the leakage of sensitive information. The proposed hardware architecture consists of XOR gates, multiplexers, and comparators. The hardware architecture was designed using Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL) and was synthesized using a Virtex4 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device. The synthesis was done using Xilinx ISE 14.7 Software which includes ISIM for simulation.

Findings: The time-to-market of an electronic product is diminishing due to the competitive nature of the hardware design space. To help cope with the short time-to-market, hardware manufacturing companies tend to integrate 3PIP cores in their designs. The recent surge of hardware Trojans in 3PIP cores make it extremely dangerous to integrate them in designs without thorough evaluation and testing. This is particularly harmful when Trojans in cryptographic 3PIP core leak sensitive information like encryption keys. Most of the proposed methods to detect or prevent the influence of hardware Trojans require a Trojan free model of the Intellectual Property (IP). The main issue with these methods is that many 3PIP cores come as black boxes which prevent designers from having access to the internal workings of the core.This work implements a method that curtails the effects of a hardware Trojan in 3PIP cryptographic cores without having access to the inner working of the design. The synthesis results indicate an area, flip-flop, and Look-up-Table overhead of 7.7%, 10.6%, and 4.6% respectively.

Improvements/Applications: The proposed method is applicable to hardware design houses that integrate untrusted 3PIP cores in their designs.Improvingthe resource consumption of the proposed method will be addressed in future works. 

Keywords: Time-to-Market, Third Party Intellectual Property, Hardware Trojan, Information Leakage, Cryptographic Cores, Hardware Design.