A Benign Hardware Trojan on FPGA-based embedded systems

In this paper we present the use of Benign Hardware Trojans (BHT) as a security measure for an embedded system with a software component and a hardware execution environment. Based on delay logic, process variation, and selective transistor aging, the BHT can be incorporated into an embedded system for the software and the hardware components to authenticate each other before functional execution. We will demonstrate an implementation of such a BHT within an embedded system on a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA platform. Using the same platform we will also show that the BHT security measurement has a low to modest amount of performance overhead basing on the test results from a variety of synthetic and real world benchmarks.