Detecting Malicious Circuits in IP-Core

The proposed Phase I project will develop a tool suite that can be used to identify malicious circuits in 3rd party IP based on an industry-unique side-channel-based hardware Trojan detection approach. The proposed solution enables malicious circuit detection in IP without the requirement of a"golden reference". It will perform hierarchical leakage (power) related static analyses on the hardware IP under investigation to extract information about their leakage distribution profile with respect to varying inputs. This information will then be synthesized in such a way as to not only identify malicious circuits but to also characterize them in terms of size and functionality. The approach works on both gate-level net lists as well as physical design database levels (post place and route).