Detecting Malicious Circuits in IP-Core using Boolean Functional Analysis

Hardware design today bears similarities to software design. Often vendors buy and integrate code acquired from third-party organizations into their designs, especially in embedded/system-on-chip designs. Currently, there is no way to determine if third-party designs have built-in backdoors that can compromise security after deployment. We propose to investigate techniques to detect backdoors in third-party IP components using principles from the area of Boolean Functional Analysis. A remarkable and novel aspect of our approach is that backdoors can be caught before the design is fabricated.