Nastaran Shekofte; Siavash Bayat Sarmadi; hatameh Mosanaei Boorani
Abstract
Hardware Trojans have emerged as a major concern for integrated circuits in recent years. As a result, detecting Trojans has become an important issue in critical applications, such as finance and health. The Trojan detection methods are mainly categorized ...
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Hardware Trojans have emerged as a major concern for integrated circuits in recent years. As a result, detecting Trojans has become an important issue in critical applications, such as finance and health. The Trojan detection methods are mainly categorized into functional and side channel based ones. To increase the capability of both mentioned detection methods, one can increase the transition activity of the circuit. This paper proposes a trusted platform for detecting Trojans in FPGA bitstreams. The proposed methodology takes advantage of increased Trojan activation, caused by transition aware partitioning of the circuit. Meanwhile, it benefits partial reconfiguration feature of FPGAs to reduce area overhead. Experimental studies on the mapped version of s38417 ISCAS89 benchmark show that for the transition probability thresholds of 10^{-4} and 2*10^{-5}, our method increases the ratio of the number of transitions (TCTCR) in the Trojan circuit by about 290.93% and 131.48%, respectively, compared to the unpartitioned circuit. Similar experiments on s15850 for the transition probability thresholds of 10^{-4} and 2*10^{-5} show an increase of 290.26% and 203.11% in TCTCR, respectively. Furthermore, this method improves the functional Trojan detection capability due to a significant increase in the ratio of observing wrong results in primary outputs.