Hardware Trojan Detection Using Effective Property-Checking Method

Abstract

Hardware Trojans refer to additional logic maliciously implanted by attackers in integrated circuits (ICs). Because of the potential security threat of hardware Trojans, they have attracted extensive attention to security issues. As a formal verification method, property checking has been proved to be a powerful solution for hardware Trojan detection. However, existing property-checking methods are limited by the unity of security properties and the model explosion problem of formal models. The limitations above hinder the practical applications of these methods. To alleviate these challenges, we propose an effective property-checking method for hardware Trojan detection. Specifically, we establish the formal model based on the principle of finite state machine (FSM), and the method can alleviate the model explosion problem. For property writing, we extract the core behavior characteristics of hardware Trojans and then generate properties for the verification of certain types of hardware Trojans. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is applicable to detect information leakage and denial of service (DoS) hardware Trojans by verifying security properties.