BISA: Built-in self-authentication for preventing hardware Trojan insertion

Abstract

Hardware Trojans have become a significant threat to government agencies and enterprises that require security and trustworthiness in systems with critical applications. Detecting hardware Trojans is very challenging because of the diversity of Trojans and unpredictable process variations during fabrication. In this paper, we propose a novel technique, called built-in self-authentication (BISA), that can fill unused spaces in a circuit layout by functional filler cells instead of non-functional filler cells. All functional filler cells will be tested by BISA itself and a digital signature would be generated. Any modification on BISA will result in a different signature. Thus, BISA can be used to prevent Trojan insertion or make Trojan insertion extremely difficult. BISA can be applied to any single-module or bottom-up hierarchical design, and we evaluate it on different circuits to demonstrate the effective of this technique.