Editor's note:Today's integrated circuits are vulnerable to hardware Trojans, which are malicious alterations to the circuit, either during design or fabrication. This article presents a classification of hardware Trojans and a survey of published techniques for Trojan detection.

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A Survey of Hardware Trojan Taxonomy and Detection

The Internet is a major technological advancement reshaping not only our society but also that of universities worldwide. In light of this, universities have to capitalise on the Internet for teaching, and one progressive development of this is the use of online delivery methods. This paper draws upon the results of a survey conducted amongst students enrolled in one online management course at an Australian university. Three critical success factors in online delivery are identified: technology, the instructor and the previous use of the technology from a student’s perspective. We also argue that the lecturer will continue to play a central role in online education, albeit his or her role will become one of a learning catalyst and knowledge navigator.

Critical success factors in online education

Security of a computer system has been traditionally related to the security of the software or the information being processed. The underlying hardware used for information processing has been considered trusted. The emergence of hardware Trojan attacks violates this root of trust. These attacks, in the form of malicious modifications of electronic hardware at different stages of its life cycle, pose major security concerns in the electronics industry. An adversary can mount such an attack with an objective to cause operational failure or to leak secret information from inside a chip-e.g., the key in a cryptographic chip, during field operation. Global economic trend that encourages increased reliance on untrusted entities in the hardware design and fabrication process is rapidly enhancing the vulnerability to such attacks. In this paper, we analyze the threat of hardware Trojan attacks; present attack models, types, and scenarios; discuss different forms of protection approaches, both proactive and reactive; and describe emerging attack modes, defenses, and future research pathways.

Hardware Trojan Attacks: Threat Analysis and Countermeasures

This paper surveys a variety of data compression methods spanning almost 40 years of research, from the work of Shannon, Fano, and Huffman in the late 1940s to a technique developed in 1986. The aim of data compression is to reduce redundancy in stored or communicated data, thus increasing effective data density. Data compression has important application in the areas of file storage and distributed systems. Concepts from information theory as they relate to the goals and evaluation of data compression methods are discussed briefly. A framework for evaluation and comparison of methods is constructed and applied to the algorithms presented. Comparisons of both theoretical and empirical natures are reported, and possibilities for future research are suggested.

Data compression

VLSI Test Principles and Architectures: Design for Testability (Systems on Silicon)

Current research into Trojan detection suggests that exhaustive Trojan detection in a chip during limited manufacturing test time is an extremely difficult problem. Indeed, an especially nefarious form of Trojan known as the time bomb has a payload activated in a delayed manner making it extremely hard to detect. As a result, chip trust detection at manufacturing test time may not be adequate especially for critical applications. This suggests that some form of dynamic trust detection of the chip both preliminary (possibly during a preproduction phase) and during in-field use at run time is required. We explore an approach to this problem that combines multicore hardware with dynamic distributed software scheduling to determine hardware trust during in-field use at run time. Our approach involves the scheduling and execution of functionally equivalent variants (obtained by different compilations, or different algorithm variations) simultaneously on different PEs and comparing the results. The process dynamically achieves trust determination by identifying the existence of Trojans with a high level of confidence.

Dynamic evaluation of hardware trust

The World Wide Web coupled with user friendly Web browsers now provide access to multimedia Web pages in universally accepted formats that can be accessed world wide easily via inexpensive desk-top computers. Everyone appears to agree that this technology will revolutionize how students, faculty, researchers, and the public access and use information. Consequently university educators are now enjoying, for the first time in history, a new way to customize and share their unique approaches to teaching and information resources in the form of text, graphics, and sound—to students both on and off campus and, with concern for the future, across time. In this paper we discuss our exploration with the use of interactive learning on the Web in an Introduction to C Programming Course taught in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Cleveland State University, and compare results with the same course taught a previous semester using no interactive WWW learning.

An experiment with WWW interactive learning in university education

Reduction of both the test suite size and the download time of test vectors is important in today's System-On-a-Chip designs. In this paper, a method for compressing the scan test patterns using the LZW algorithm is presented. This method leverages the large number of "Don't-Cares" in test vectors in order to improve the compression ratio significantly. The hardware decompression architecture presented here uses existing on-chip embedded memories. Tests using the ISCAS89 and the ITC99 benchmarks show that this method achieves high compression ratios.

A Technique for High Ratio LZW Compression

Both static and dynamic Huffman coding techniques are applied to test data consisting of 530 source programs in four different languages. The results indicate that, for small files, a savings of 22-91 percent in compression can be achieved by using the static instead of dynamic techniques.

Data compression using static Huffman code-decode tables

Harvesting energy from the environment can play an important role in reducing the dependency of an electronic system to primary energy sources (i.e. AC power or battery). For reliable and efficient energy harvesting while assuring best user experience, it is important to manage, route and match the harvested energy with the demand of various energy sources. In the most general case, multiple different energy sources can be used to provide energy to multiple different energy users. In this work, we propose a scalable rule-based energy management system for managing the acquisition, mixing, delivery and storage of energy for arbitrary collection of energy sources and users, which are characterized with different energy generation and consumption parameters. The system uses economics inspired supply-demand model for efficiently managing energy distribution between a set of energy sources and users. The energy allocation procedure tries to maximize the energy utilization efficiency of the sources while satisfying the demand of the users in order of their associated priorities, without starving an already allocated user. Simulation results for example scenarios show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for improving the energy utilization and lifetime of the energy sources.

David R. McIntyre

Papers

Dynamic evaluation of hardware trust

An experiment with WWW interactive learning in university education

A Technique for High Ratio LZW Compression

Data compression using static Huffman code-decode tables

A supply-demand model based scalable energy management system for improved energy utilization efficiency