Identification of Trojans in an FPGA using low-precision equipment

Hardware Trojans pose a difficult threat to hardware systems due to the difficulty in their identification. In many cases, the differences observed between Trojan and Trusted chips can be very small. This research explored the feasibility of using low-precision test equipment in order to identify malicious modifications to circuits programmed to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Examination using an ELVIS II Instrumentation board was able to correctly classify ISCAS85 c6288 multipliers based on their internal structure, allowing for identification of suspected designs. These tests were conducted in the context of the 2012 Cyber-Security Awareness Week Embedded Systems Challenge.