Hardware Trojan Detection Using Reconfigurable Assertion Checkers

In this paper, reconfigurable assertion checkers (RACs) are proposed for hardware Trojan detection on a system-on-chip (SoC). A modified circuit design flow to incorporate RACs into an SoC is proposed. A flexible RAC architecture is developed to implement different types of assertions. Case studies of mapping a simple assertion checker into RAC are given. The utilization of RAC in detecting hardware Trojans is demonstrated in two advanced microcontroller bus architecture (AMBA) case studies: a denial-of-service (DoS) hardware Trojan and a leak of information hardware Trojan. In both cases, our proposed RAC was able to detect the hardware Trojan whenever the Trojan was triggered.