EETD: An Energy Efficient Design for Runtime Hardware Trojan Detection in Untrusted Network-on-Chip

Network-on-chip (NoC) is a communication intellectual property (IP) core, popularly used in the system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. The NoC IP core often comes from an untrusted 3rd-party vendor and may have hardware Trojans. The Trojan in the NoC can eavesdrop packets, modify data and divert packet to the wrong location, hence, endangering system's confidentiality, integrity, and availability. However, if the activation probability of the Trojan is very low or the Trojan is never activated, a significant amount of energy is wasted due to authentication. The unnecessary authentication in such cases also greatly affects the system performance and availability. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient Trojan detection design (EETD) where the authentication gets activated only when the hardware Trojan has been triggered in the system. Our experimental results show that EETD improves the energy overhead and performance overhead by 38% and 40% as compared to the state-of-the-art technique on an 8×8 2D-mesh NoC. Our experiments, also show that EETD takes almost 10μs to localize 95% of the Trojan infected nodes.