Analyzing circuit vulnerability to hardware Trojan insertion at the behavioral level

Considerable attention has been paid to hardware Trojan detection and prevention. However, there is no existing systematic approach to investigate circuit vulnerability to hardware Trojan insertion during development. We present such an approach to investigate circuit vulnerability to Trojan insertion at the behavioral level. This novel vulnerability analysis determines a circuit´s susceptibility to Trojan insertion based on statement hardness analysis as well as observability of circuit signals. Further, the Trojan detectability metric is introduced to quantitatively compare the detectability of behavioral Trojans inserted into different circuits. This creates a fair comparison for analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of Trojan detection techniques as well as helping verify trustworthiness of a third party Intellectual Property (IP).