Hardware Trojan Focusing on Plaintext in Power Analysis Attacks

Recentry, Intellectual Property (IP) based design is one of the most popular LSI design methods. In those IP based design methods, the threat of hardware trojan wchich is embedded directly in some devices has been reported. In particular, when a trojan is embedded in a security device such as a cryptographic circuit, confidential information such as personal information and privacy information is leaked. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the insertion method and detection method of hardware trojan in security devices. For this reasons, this study proposes a hardware trojan focusing on plaintext against a lightweight block cipher PRINCE as a security device oriented IoT. The target of cryptographic circuit implements a countermeasure method for power analysis attacks that use specific plaintext to attack illegally. The proposed trojan is difficult to detect under the normal security verification for power analysis attacks. Experiments showed how difficult the proposed trojan embedded in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is detected in terms of implementation overhead.