Advancing the State-of-the-Art in Hardware Trojans Detection

Over the past decade, Hardware Trojans (HTs) research community has made significant progress towards developing effective countermeasures for various types of HTs, yet these countermeasures are shown to be circumvented by sophisticated HTs designed subsequently. Therefore, instead of guaranteeing a certain (low) false negative rate for a small constant set of publicly known HTs, a rigorous security framework of HTs should provide an effective algorithm to detect any HT from an exponentially large class (exponential in number of wires in IP core) of HTs with negligible false negative rate. In this work, we present HaTCh, the first rigorous algorithm of HT detection within the paradigm of pre-silicon logic testing based tools. HaTCh detects any HT from HD, a huge class of deterministic HTs which is orders of magnitude larger than the small subclass (e.g. TrustHub) considered in the current literature. We prove that HaTCh offers negligible false negative rate and controllable false positive rate for the class HD. Given certain global characteristics regarding the stealthiness of the HT within HD, the computational complexity of HaTCh for practical HTs scales polynomially with the number of wires in the IP core. We implement and test HaTCh on TrustHub and other sophisticated HTs.