Power based Self-Referencing Scheme for Hardware Trojan Detection and Diagnosis

Due to the expeditious growth and recent trends in Integrated Circuit (IC) industry, intrusion in terms of Hardware Trojans (HT) has become a major threat for IC security and reliability. Modern VLSI trends make the design vulnerable for possible HT insertion in various design and manufacturing phases. Growing design complexity in terms of number of gates, high testing cost and increased process variation makes HT detection and diagnosis more challenging. Logic testing has become ineffective against current threats due to their rare activation and stealthy nature. Side channel analysis has emerged as a promising technique but most of which relies on availability of HT free golden chips. In this paper, a golden chip free self-referencing scheme for sequential Trojan detection by comparing the IC’s power signature at different time windows is proposed. The technique is evaluated on a 4-bit ALU and a set of ISCAS’85 benchmarks.