Defeating hardware spyware in third party IPs

Hardware spyware detection is a very critical topic, especially as untrusted third parties contribute in designing and/or manufacturing. Comparing a suspected design with a golden one is the most common way to detect hardware Trojans. But, this methodology cannot be used with third party IPs, as we have no golden IP to compare with. In this work, we present a novel technique for system protection that alleviates the need for a golden chip. We aim to decrease the ability of leaking sensitive information by infected IPs. We use IPs output multiplexing and cyclic redundancy check to achieve negligible probability of losing sensitive information and to detect IP Spyware. We show the practicality of the introduced schemes by implementing the provided methodologies on a FPGA. Experimental results illustrate a negligible delay overhead while the area and power overheads can be tolerated for critical systems information security.