Hardware Trojan detection using the backscattering side channel

Abstract

Integrated circuits (IC) have become an integral aspect of our lives. Thus, the problem of ensuring authenticity and trust for ICs is critically important, especially for sensitive fields such as military, finance, and governmental infrastructure. However, cost and time-to-market considerations have led IC vendors to outsource many steps in the IC supply chain. The sheer number and diversity of entities involved in modern IC supply chain, each with its own set of potentially malicious actors that can insert malicious modifications, referred as hardware Trojan (HT), in the IC, makes it difficult to trust the resulting ICs. As a result, demand for effective HT detection techniques has risen considerably. Numerous HT detection techniques have been published and side-channel analysis based approaches are among the most widely used. However, the problem with existing side-channels is that they do not provide enough resolution bandwidth, and information about the operation of electronic circuitry to detect small dormant hardware Trojan. Motivated by these problems, my research focuses on introducing a new side-channel, i.e., the backscattering side-channel, and proposing novel techniques for HT detection using the new side-channel.