Towards a comprehensive and systematic classification of hardware Trojans

Recently, there have been reports of Trojans being inserted at the hardware level. It is necessary to understand the characteristics of these hardware Trojans to be able to develop systematic methods to detect their presence. Absent this, only ad-hoc methods can be developed. Also, developed detection methods are not being adequately tested on a comprehensive set of benchmarks. We propose a comprehensive taxonomy of hardware Trojans based on five intuitive attributes. We organized the embedded systems challenge (ESC) to compile Trojans and analysed them to validate the taxonomy.