Rise of the Hardware Trojans

Driven by strong economic incentives the globalization of the semiconductor design and fabrication industries has given rise to numerous vulnerabilities in the manufacturing chain. From design to production countless hands contribute until fabrication is completed. An adversary can introduce a Trojan designed to disable and/or destroy a system at some future time or the Trojan may leak confidential information and secret keys covertly to the adversary. These vulnerabilities have raised serious concerns regarding possible threats to financial infrastructures, transportation security systems, and military systems. Clearly there is a strong motivation to classify and study adversarial hardware design modifications, i.e. hardware Trojan horses. Here we very briefly summarize types of hardware Trojans and refer the reader to relevant works.