Hardware trust has become important and has seen major growth over the last several years. There is a large and active group of academic and industry researchers working on various aspects of the hardware trust problem. However, most research in this area is currently carried out in an ad-hoc fashion and results are reported using figures of merit that prevent objective cross-field comparisons of Trojan detection schemes.
A few benchmark circuits infected with hardware Trojans (called trust benchmarks) are developed. The trust benchmarks pass a thorough test procedure and several detection techniques. To support further validation of the trust benchmarks, hardware platforms are developed to validate trust benchmarks and a web portal is set up to make the benchmarks and hardware platforms available to help accelerate research in hardware security and trust. Technical meetings are scheduled to collect feedbacks from experts in the community about the benchmarks and hardware platforms.
The intellectual merit of this proposal include development of (i) a detailed taxonomy for Trojans, (ii) a set of static trust benchmarks, (iii) a number of hard-to-detect Trojans, (iv) hardware platforms for hardware emulation and validation of Trojan detection methods, and (v) a repository called Trust-Hub. A trust benchmark is selected for fabrication using the MOSIS program.
Abstract: Hardware security and trust has become important and has seen major growth over the past several years. Currently, most research in this area is carried out in an uncoordinated basis in labs around the world using an assortment of home-grown reference designs, simulation environments, and results are reported in terms of ad-hoc figures of merit. The main objective is to provide an opportunity to synchronize the research activities in this community and help accelerate the research and development by providing common hardware validation platforms that can enable effective implementation of circuits infected by Trojans (called trust benchmarks). Intellectual Merits: Since the early days of computer science and engineering, benchmarking has played an important role and influenced major hardware and software concepts. In this project, we developed trust benchmark circuits. To support validation of the trust benchmarks, we created hardware platforms to validate trust benchmarks, and a web portal (www.trust-hub.org) to help accelerate research in hardware security and trust. The intellectual merit of this project include development of (i) a detailed taxonomy for Trojans, (ii) a set of static trust benchmarks, (iii) a number of hard-to-detect Trojans, (iv) benchmark complexity analysis, (v) hardware platforms for hardware emulation and validation of Trojan detection methods, and (vii) a repository called Trust-Hub. Broader Impacts: The results of this project would be of interest to fabless semiconductor companies, US government agencies and university researchers worldwide. Benefits to the society include trustworthy electronics for healthcare, defense, weather forecasting, finance, transportation, and automotive applications. Trust benchmarks and Trojan detection techniques help in detecting manufacturing defects, aid silicon debug and improve parametric reliability. The benchmarks have also been used in the embedded systems challenge held annually at NYU-Poly. This research impacts the education of students and semiconductor industry professionals through courses, online materials, and on- and off-campus seminars. Summary of the Outcomes: One graduate and one undergraduate students worked on developing a preliminary set of Trust Benchmarks and the Trust-Hub web portal. The benchmarks were tested and validated by the students using a validation tool suite. The tool is able to generate functional and structural tests and apply them to the circuit under authentication. This was a planning project. The PIs scheduled meetings with experts in the area of hardware security and trust from academia, industry, and government. The feedbacks from these experts were collected and reported to NSF. Design of trust benchmarks provided a great deal of experience to the students involved in this project to design, verification, and test of integrated circuits. The PIs have set up a web-based dissemination portal, called Trust-Hub, to make all benchmark circuits and the common hardware platforms available to public. This webpage has become a hub for the many researchers in academia and industry for their hardware hardware security and trust related issues and needs. Over the past 20 months, thousands of researchers have visited Trust-Hub and the website has had more 250,000 hits. This demonstrates that the community is very much interested in this web portal and that they are able to find their news, papers, events, etc. in this webpage. Through various events such as IEEE HOST/DAC, we have distributed brochures about trust-hub and have advertised it through various channels such as TTTC, IEEE HOST, monthly newsletter, etc.
