Hardware Trojan detection via current measurement: A method immune to process variation effects

Malicious modification of integrated circuits referred to as Hardware Trojan fabricated in untrusted foundries pose a growing concern on reliable and security application. In order to ensure trusted in-filed operation of integrated circuits, many techniques are developed to authenticate Hardware Trojan often called trojan detection. Among these techniques side-channel signals analysis is a widely researched method to detect Hardware Trojan but suffer from sensitivity decreasing caused by increasing process variation effects. In this paper, we propose a non-invasive Hardware Trojan detection method which is immune to process variation effects. The method exploits the intrinsic relationship between transient current (I_ddt) and quiescent current (I_ddq) and I_DDT of different test vectors that can eliminate the effects of process variation. The proposed method is verified by Hspice simulation carried on ISCAS 85 benchmark circuit. The 100 times simulation results with 130nm CMOS process using Monte Carlo method show that the suggested methods are capable of detecting the Hardware Trojan whose equivalent area is as small as 10"⁴ of the total size of the circuit in the presence of ±7% parameter(threshold voltage) variations.