The untrusted parties in the global supply chain may tamper with the original design and/or introduce malicious components known as hardware Trojans. As the measurable changes (e.g., delay, power, area, and temperature) introduced by hardware Trojans become relatively small compared with the overall system-under-attack characteristics, side-channel analysis based Trojan detection lose their efficacy. Moreover, the lack of a golden reference model makes Trojan detection difficult. To tackle these emerging challenges, we propose to obfuscate the hardware design at multiple abstraction levels.
Obfuscation is a process to make a target of interest “obscure”, difficult to identify, or unclear. Obfuscation techniques are common in the software world, but its application to hardware security is quite recent. My research team has successfully developed design obfuscation techniques on circuit, gate, and on-chip communication network levels. Our work indicates that hardware obfuscation methods are truly promising to protect hardware from Trojan insertion at different abstract levels.
Relevant publications:
- Yu Q, Dofe J, Zhang Z. Exploiting hardware obfuscation methods to prevent and detect hardware Trojans, in 2017 IEEE 60th International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS). ; 2017 :819-822.
- Dofe J, Yu Q. Novel Dynamic State-Deflection Method for Gate-Level Design Obfuscation. Trans. Comp.-Aided Des. Integ. Cir. Sys. [Internet]. 2018;37 (2) :273–285.
- Dofe J, Zhang Y, Yu Q. DSD: A Dynamic State-Deflection Method for Gate-Level Netlist Obfuscation, in 2016 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI). ; 2016 :565-570.