A Comparison of TERO and RO Timing Sensitivity for Hardware Trojan Detection Applications

A Ring Oscillator (RO) integrated in a design can be used for detecting insertion of malicious logic i.e., a hardware Trojan horse. Recently, the Transition Effect Ring Oscillator (TERO) was proposed as a means for implementing True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) and Physically Uncloneable Functions (PUFs). In this paper, we explore the timing sensitivity of TERO against RO, towards introducing TERO as an alternative means for detecting Trojans on FPGAs.