Golden Reference Library Matching of Structural Checking for securing soft IPs

Inclusion of malicious logic (i.e., hardware Trojan) in 3rd party soft intellectual properties (IPs) has become a major concern in hardware security, since soft IPs are building blocks of larger hardware systems. Based on previous work of Structural Checking, this paper presents a novel method named Golden Reference Library Matching, in order to identify malicious logic by comparing IPs to trusted counterparts. A Golden Reference Library (GRL) is constructed by collecting unique signal asset patterns of trusted digital IPs of various functionalities. This library provides a means for Structural Checking to analyze complex circuit structure and identify functionality of an untrusted IP design. Structural Checking compares an unidentified asset pattern of a target design to the trusted asset patterns in GRL. The matching method allows for the evaluation and presentation of partial matches between asset patterns using percentile numbers. The trustworthiness of the target IP and the suspicious circuit elements can then be determined by the matching results and additional Trojan detection methods derived from Structural Checking.