A Trojan-resistant system-on-chip bus architecture

Communications systems are increasingly reliant on system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. As the complexity and size of SoCs continues to grow, so does the risk of ¿Trojan¿ attacks, in which an integrated circuit (IC) design is surreptitiously and maliciously altered at some point during the design or manufacturing process. Despite the risks that such an attack entail, relatively little attention has been given in the literature to methods enabling detection of and response to run-time Trojan attacks. In the present paper, we present a Trojan-resistant system bus architecture suitable across a wide range of SoC bus systems. The system detects malicious bus behaviors associated Trojan hardware, protects the system and system bus from them and reports the malicious behaviors to the CPU. We show that use of this bus and associated embedded software is highly effective in reducing IC Trojan vulnerabilities without loss of bus performance.