A layout-aware approach for improving localized switching to detect hardware Trojans in integrated circuits

Malicious activities and alterations to integrated circuits have raised serious concerns to government agencies and the semiconductor industry. The added functionality, known as hardware Trojan, poses major detection and isolation challenges. In this paper, we present a method to localize design switching to any specific region independent from test patterns. The new architecture allows activating any target region and keeping others quiet which reduces total circuit switching activity. This helps magnify the Trojan´s contribution to the total circuit transient power by increasing Trojan-to-circuit switching activity (TCA) and power consumption. The proposed method is aimed at improving the efficiency of power-based side-channel signal analysis techniques for detecting hardware Trojans. Our simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the method in significantly increasing TCA.