The objective of Trust-Hub project is to lead a community-wide movement toward stronger assurances in the digital hardware industry. The Trust-Hub is a means for information sharing between researchers and practitioners to accelerate the development of defenses against hardware-level attacks. This project proposes the development of Trust-Hub, a central web-based repository for technical papers, benchmarks, hardware platforms, source codes, tools, and other information that accelerates hardware security research and developments.
Intellectual Merits: This project plans to develop benchmark circuits infected with hardware Trojans (called trust benchmarks), create hardware platforms to validate trust benchmarks, and develop a web portal to accelerate research and development in hardware security and trust. The project includes (i) creation of a large set of static trust benchmarks, (ii) benchmark complexity analysis, (iii) procedures to dynamically generate trust benchmarks with hard-to-detect Trojan instances, (iv) platforms for hardware emulation and validation of Trojan detection methods, (vii) a web-based repository called Trust-Hub, and (viii) comprehensive validation test suites.
Broader Impacts: The results of this project would be of interest to fab-less 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. By integrating the results of this project into existing courses and by offering new courses in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, the PIs will impart cutting-edge engineering knowledge to students and improve their hardware design, security verification and test skills.
With the globalization of semiconductor industry, design and fabrication of integrated circuits (ICs) have become increasingly vulnerable to malicious activities and alterations. The vulnerabilities raise serious concerns regarding possible threats to military systems, financial infrastructures, power grid systems, medical systems, transportation infrastructure and even household appliances. Most ICs, including those embedded into security-critical systems, are in use without security assurances. The objective of this project was to lead a community-wide movement toward stronger assurances in the digital hardware industry. We propose a system of information sharing between researchers and practitioners that will accelerate the development of defenses against hardware infiltration. Based on the proven effectiveness of information sharing in the crypto research and development community, we propose the development of an information hub, called Trust-Hub, a central web-based repository for technical papers, benchmarks, hardware platforms, source codes, tools, and much other information that accelerates hardware security research and developments. Currently, most research in the hardware security and trust area used to be carried out in an ad-hoc fashion and results were reported using figures of merit that prevent objective cross-field comparisons of Trojan (malware) detection schemes. This could be addressed by developing benchmarks and common platforms as a baseline to evaluate competing methodologies developed by hardware-oriented security and trust researchers. In this project we have developed more than 100 benchmark circuits infected with hardware Trojans (called trust benchmarks). The benchmarks are now being used by many researchers across the globe. We also created three hardware platforms to validate trust benchmarks, and a web portal to accelerate research and development in hardware security and trust. The software we developed is now also being used by numerous university researchers and students. The Trust-Hub web portal also provides a significant amount of information daily to its audience – those include funding opportunities, conference, meetings, courses, tutorials, and more. The intellectual merit of this proposal include development of (i) a detailed taxonomy for hardware Trojans, (ii) a large set of static trust benchmarks, (iii) a number of hard-to-detect Trojans, (iv) benchmark complexity analysis, (v) procedures to dynamically generate trust benchmarks with hard-to-detect Trojan instances, (vi) hardware platforms for hardware emulation and validation of Trojan detection methods, (vii) a repository called Trust-Hub, and (viii) comprehensive validation test suites. The results of this project would be of interest to fabless semiconductor companies, US government agencies and university researchers worldwide. The results have been published in technical events, book, technical reports, Trust-Hub web portal, and more. We have presented tutorials and workshops at conferences, and to semiconductor companies and government agencies. The benchmarks have also been in the Embedded Systems Challenge held annually at NYU-Poly.
