Combating Data Leakage Trojans in Sequential Circuits Through Randomized Encoding

Globalization of micro-chip fabrication has opened a new avenue of cyber-crime. It is now possible to insert hardware Trojans directly into the chip during the manufacturing process. These hardware Trojans are capable of destroying a chip, reducing performance or even capturing sensitive data. This paper presents a modification to a recently presented method of Trojan defense known as RECORD: Randomized Encoding of COmbinational Logic for Resistance to Data Leakage. RECORD aims to prevent data leakage through a randomized encoding and split manufacturing scheme. Its weakness, however, it that it is only applicable to combinational circuits. Sequential RECORD proposes a method to extend RECORD concepts to sequential designs. Experimental work with Sequential RECORD on a Data Encryption Standard circuit show that it is effective with the cost of a 3.75x area overhead, 4.5x power overhead and only a 3% decrease in performance.