(Invited Paper) Hardware Trojan Detection by Fine-grained Power Domain Partitioning

Hardware Trojans (HTs) are regarded as a security threat in the information society. HTs are unintentionally injected into LSI circuits by untrusted entities before the chip fabrication. HTs trigger malicious operations such as information leakage without designers noticing their operations. This paper proposes fine-grained power domain partitioning, which is a circuit design technique for detecting HT activities. This paper assumes a scenario where a fab injects HTs into the taped-out layout data and that circuit designers test the presence of HTs by using side-channel information (power consumption) of fabricated chips. Fine-grained power domain partitioning decomposes the power domain of target circuit into multiple power domains, enabling to effectively measure the small power consumption introduced by activities of tiny HTs. The measurement result using an HT-injected Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) circuit with fine-grained power domain partitioning shows that HTs can be detected.