Quantification of Power Based Hardware Trojan Detection Under Realistic Variations and Separation of Power Supplies

Abstract

Advances in technology and the increasing economic burden of manufacturing fabs resulted in integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing outside the homeland. The availability of intentional insertion of malicious circuitry (hardware Trojan) drew concerns towards hardware Trojan detection. Side channel analysis based on power is one of the proposed detection methods. However, the main enemy of the method is unavoidable process variations which can easily hide the effect of Trojan. In this paper, using precise Spice simulations, we quantify the difficulty of Trojan detection based on power under realistic variations. Also, a method is devised to decrease the number of additional pins when separating the circuit into many grids, which is shown to be a necessity for Trojan detection in actual integrated circuits.