Trojan Side-Channels: Lightweight Hardware Trojans through Side-Channel Engineering
Lang Lin18
, Markus Kasper19
, Tim Güneysu19
, Christof Paar18, 19
and Wayne Burleson18 
| (18) |
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA |
| (19) |
Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany |
Abstract
The general trend in semiconductor industry to separate design from fabrication leads to potential threats from untrusted
integrated circuit foundries. In particular, malicious hardware components can be covertly inserted at the foundry to implement
hidden backdoors for unauthorized exposure of secret information. This paper proposes a new class of hardware Trojans which
intentionally induce physical side-channels to convey secret information. We demonstrate power side-channels engineered to
leak information below the effective noise power level of the device. Two concepts of very small implementations of Trojan side-channels (TSC) are introduced and evaluated with respect to their feasibility on Xilinx FPGAs. Their lightweight implementations indicate
a high resistance to detection by conventional test and inspection methods. Furthermore, the proposed TSCs come with a physical
encryption property, so that even a successful detection of the artificially introduced side-channel will not allow unhindered
access to the secret information.
Keywords Trojan Hardware - Side-Channel Analysis - Covert Channel - Trojan Side-Channel - Hardware Trojan Detection
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