Dynamic evaluation of hardware trust

Abstract

Current research into Trojan detection suggests that exhaustive Trojan detection in a chip during limited manufacturing test time is an extremely difficult problem. Indeed, an especially nefarious form of Trojan known as the time bomb has a payload activated in a delayed manner making it extremely hard to detect. As a result, chip trust detection at manufacturing test time may not be adequate especially for critical applications. This suggests that some form of dynamic trust detection of the chip both preliminary (possibly during a preproduction phase) and during in-field use at run time is required. We explore an approach to this problem that combines multicore hardware with dynamic distributed software scheduling to determine hardware trust during in-field use at run time. Our approach involves the scheduling and execution of functionally equivalent variants (obtained by different compilations, or different algorithm variations) simultaneously on different PEs and comparing the results. The process dynamically achieves trust determination by identifying the existence of Trojans with a high level of confidence.