Data Activated Processor Hardware Trojan Detection Using Differential Bit Power Analysis

Processor is the core chip of modern information processing system, which is seriously threatened by hardware Trojan. Side-channel analysis is the most promising method for hardware Trojan detection. However, most existing side-channel based detection approaches require golden chips as reference, which significantly increases the test cost and complexity. In this paper, we present a novel differential bit power analysis method which can detect data activated processor hardware Trojan without the need of golden chips or models. The proposed method exploits the intrinsic consistency of bit powers to detect outliers impacted by hardware Trojans. Data related power model of processor is amended. Differential bit power analysis program is proposed. Experimental measurements are done on field programmable gate array chip with open source 8051 processor and hardware Trojans. The effectiveness of propose method is proved by experiment results.