Design for Assurance: Employing Functional Verification Tools for Thwarting Hardware Trojan Threat in 3PIPs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hu, Wei, Li, Beibei, Wu, Lingjuan, Li, Yiwei, Li, Xuefei, Hong, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911139671048192
author Hu, Wei
Li, Beibei
Wu, Lingjuan
Li, Yiwei
Li, Xuefei
Hong, Liang
author_facet Hu, Wei
Li, Beibei
Wu, Lingjuan
Li, Yiwei
Li, Xuefei
Hong, Liang
contents Third-party intellectual property cores are essential building blocks of modern system-on-chip and integrated circuit designs. However, these design components usually come from vendors of different trust levels and may contain undocumented design functionality. Distinguishing such stealthy lightweight malicious design modification can be a challenging task due to the lack of a golden reference. In this work, we make a step towards design for assurance by developing a method for identifying and preventing hardware Trojans, employing functional verification tools and languages familiar to hardware designers. We dump synthesized design netlist mapped to a field programmable gate array technology library and perform switching as well as coverage analysis at the granularity of look-up-tables (LUTs) in order to identify specious signals and cells. We automatically extract and formally prove properties related to switching and coverage, which allows us to retrieve Trojan trigger condition. We further provide a solution to preventing Trojan from activation by reconfiguring the confirmed malicious LUTs. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method can detect and mitigate Trust-Hub as well as recently reported don't care Trojans.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_12321
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Design for Assurance: Employing Functional Verification Tools for Thwarting Hardware Trojan Threat in 3PIPs
Hu, Wei
Li, Beibei
Wu, Lingjuan
Li, Yiwei
Li, Xuefei
Hong, Liang
Cryptography and Security
Third-party intellectual property cores are essential building blocks of modern system-on-chip and integrated circuit designs. However, these design components usually come from vendors of different trust levels and may contain undocumented design functionality. Distinguishing such stealthy lightweight malicious design modification can be a challenging task due to the lack of a golden reference. In this work, we make a step towards design for assurance by developing a method for identifying and preventing hardware Trojans, employing functional verification tools and languages familiar to hardware designers. We dump synthesized design netlist mapped to a field programmable gate array technology library and perform switching as well as coverage analysis at the granularity of look-up-tables (LUTs) in order to identify specious signals and cells. We automatically extract and formally prove properties related to switching and coverage, which allows us to retrieve Trojan trigger condition. We further provide a solution to preventing Trojan from activation by reconfiguring the confirmed malicious LUTs. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method can detect and mitigate Trust-Hub as well as recently reported don't care Trojans.
title Design for Assurance: Employing Functional Verification Tools for Thwarting Hardware Trojan Threat in 3PIPs
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12321