Detection of Hardware Trojans in Third-Party Intellectual Property Using Untrusted Modules

During the design of an integrated circuit, there are several opportunities for adversaries to make malicious modifications or insertions to a design. These attacks, known as hardware Trojans, can have catastrophic effects on a circuit if left undetected. This paper describes a technique for identifying hardware Trojans with logic-based payloads that are hidden within third-party intellectual property. Through comparison of two similar but untrusted designs, functional differences can be identified for all possible input combinations within a window of time. This technique was tested on multiple Trojan benchmarks and was found to be very effective, both in detectability and in speed of testing. As this technique has very low costs to implement, it represents an easy way for designers to gain a level of trust in previously untrusted designs.