A region based approach for the identification of hardware Trojans

Outsourcing of SoC fabrication units has created the potential threat of design tampering using hardware Trojans. Methods based on side-channel analysis exist to differentiate such maligned ICs from the genuine ones but process variation in the foundries limit the effectiveness of such approaches. In this work, we propose a circuit partition based approach to detect and locate the embedded Trojan. Results show that our approach is effective in separating out candidate Trojans in the circuit. In addition, we provide a power profile based method for refining the candidate regions that may contain a Trojan. In many cases, such an isolation method leads to noticeable manifestation of the anomalous behavior of the circuit due to the presence of the Trojan thereby enhancing chances of their detection.