EM-based detection of hardware trojans on FPGAs

The detectability of malicious circuitry on FPGAs with varying placement properties yet has to be investigated. The authors utilize a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro target platform in order to insert a sequential denial-of-service Trojan into an existing AES design by manipulating a Xilinx-specific, intermediate file format prior to the bitstream generation. Thereby, there is no need for an attacker to acquire access to the hardware description language representation of a potential target architecture. Using a side-channel analysis setup for electromagnetic emanation (EM) measurements, they evaluate the detectability of different Trojan designs with varying location and logic distribution properties. The authors successfully distinguish the malicious from the genuine designs and provide information on how the location and distribution properties of the Trojan logic affect its detectability. To the best of their knowledge, this has been the first practically conducted Trojan detection using localized EM measurements.