VeriTrust: Verification for Hardware Trust

Abstract

Today's integrated circuit designs are vulnerable to a wide range of malicious alterations, namely hardware Trojans (HTs). HTs serve as backdoors to subvert or augment the normal operation of infected devices, which may lead to functionality changes, sensitive information leakages, or denial of service attacks. To tackle such threats, this paper proposes a novel verification technique for hardware trust, namely VeriTrust, which facilitates to detect HTs inserted at design stage. Based on the observation that HTs are usually activated by dedicated trigger inputs that are not sensitized with verification test cases, VeriTrust automatically identifies such potential HT trigger inputs by examining verification corners. The key difference between VeriTrust and existing HT detection techniques based on “unused circuit identification” is that VeriTrust is insensitive to the implementation style of HTs. Experimental results show that VeriTrust is able to detect all HTs evaluated in this paper (constructed based on various HT design methodologies shown in this paper) at the cost of moderate extra verification time.