A security-aware design scheme for better hardware Trojan detection sensitivity

Due to the trend of outsourcing designs to foundries overseas, there has been an increasing threat of malicious modifications to the original integrated circuits (ICs), also known as hardware Trojans. Numerous countermeasures have been proposed. However, very little effort has been made to design-time strategies that help to make test-time or run-time detection of Trojans easier. In this paper, we characterize each cell's sensitivity to malicious modifications and develop an algorithm to select a subset of standard cells for a given circuit such that Trojans are easily detected using [1] when the circuit is synthesized on it. Experiments on 8 publicly available benchmarks show that using our method, we could detect on average 16.87% more Trojans with very small power/area overhead and no timing violations.