MERO: A Statistical Approach for Hardware Trojan Detection

In order to ensure trusted in-field operation of integrated circuits, it is important to develop efficient low-cost techniques to detect malicious tampering (also referred to as Hardware Trojan) that causes undesired change in functional behavior. Conventional post-manufacturing testing, test generation algorithms and test coverage metrics cannot be readily extended to hardware Trojan detection. In this paper; we propose a test pattern generation technique based on multiple excitation of rare logic conditions at internal nodes. Such a statistical approach maximizes the probability of inserted Trojans getting triggered and detected by logic testing, while drastically reducing the number of vectors compared to a weighted random pattern based test generation. Moreover, the proposed test generation approach can be effective towards increasing the sensitivity of Trojan detection in existing side-channel approaches that monitor the impact of a Trojan circuit on power or current signature. Simulation results for a set of ISCAS benchmarks show that the proposed test generation approach can achieve comparable or better Trojan detection coverage with about 85% reduction in test length on average over random patterns.