A novel analysis method of power signal for integrated circuits Trojan detection

Integrated circuits (ICs) may be inserted malicious circuits as a hardware Trojan during fabrication in untrusted foundries. This poses a significant risk in terms of their trusted field operation. It is extremely difficult to discover such Trojan circuits using conventional testing strategies. In this paper, we propose a non-destructive, Mahalanobis distance based Trojan detection approach. The approach is validated using power simulation with a 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher circuit. The experiments show that, Trojans which are 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the AES circuit can be detected by using our Mahalanobis distance based Trojan detection approach.