Sensitivity-aware Hardware Trojan Injection for SET Propagation and Soft Error Attacks

Soft Errors and Hardware Trojans (HT) constitute a major reliability concern, and their combination can pose an even more challenging threat to circuit security. The main idea of this paper is to identify the optimal regions for attackers to inject a reliability-based HT, to create challenging benchmarks for evaluating detection techniques. In this context, a method that combines the generation and propagation of Single Event Transients (SETs), taking into consideration the masking effects, is implemented to pinpoint the critical gates. The HTs should be injected at the output of the sensitive gates that exhibit 50%-70% vulnerability level to a soft error, to ensure the HTs remain stealthy and thus, challenging to detect. The experimental results indicate that the selection of this category of gates is highly effective due to the significant increase in the number of Soft Errors, leading to aggravated circuit vulnerability. The average increase of 32.6% in the targeted gates sensitivity shows the significance of providing robust benchmarks to combat potential attacks of this kind.