Trojan

About: Trojan is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2028 publications have been published within this topic receiving 33209 citations.

A Survey of Hardware Trojan Taxonomy and Detection

Abstract: 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.

Chaotic capture of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids in the early Solar System.

Abstract: A collection of three papers in this issue, tackling seemingly unrelated planetary phenomena, marks a notable unification of Solar System dynamics. The three problems covered are the hard-to-explain orbits of giant planets, the evolution of the orbits of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, and the cause of the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’ that peppered the Moon with meteors, comets and asteroids some 700 million years after the planets were formed. Key to all these events, on this new model, was a rapid migration of the giant planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus) after a long period of stability within the Solar System. Jupiter's Trojans are asteroids that follow essentially the same orbit as Jupiter, but lead or trail the planet by an angular distance of ∼60 degrees (co-orbital motion). They are hypothesized to be planetesimals that formed near Jupiter and were captured onto their current orbits while Jupiter was growing1,2, possibly with the help of gas drag3,4,5,6 and/or collisions7. This idea, however, cannot explain some basic properties of the Trojan population, in particular its broad orbital inclination distribution, which ranges up to ∼40 degrees (ref. 8). Here we show that the Trojans could have formed in more distant regions and been subsequently captured into co-orbital motion with Jupiter during the time when the giant planets migrated by removing neighbouring planetesimals9,10,11,12. The capture was possible during a short period of time, just after Jupiter and Saturn crossed their mutual 1:2 resonance, when the dynamics of the Trojan region were completely chaotic. Our simulations of this process satisfactorily reproduce the orbital distribution of the Trojans and their total mass.

Trojan Detection using IC Fingerprinting

Abstract: Hardware manufacturers are increasingly outsourcing their IC fabrication work overseas due to their much lower cost structure. This poses a significant security risk for ICs used for critical military and business applications. Attackers can exploit this loss of control to substitute Trojan ICs for genuine ones or insert a Trojan circuit into the design or mask used for fabrication. We show that a technique borrowed from side-channel cryptanalysis can be used to mitigate this problem. Our approach uses noise modeling to construct a set of fingerprints/or an IC family utilizing side- channel information such as power, temperature, and electromagnetic (EM) profiles. The set of fingerprints can be developed using a few ICs from a batch and only these ICs would have to be invasively tested to ensure that they were all authentic. The remaining ICs are verified using statistical tests against the fingerprints. We describe the theoretical framework and present preliminary experimental results to show that this approach is viable by presenting results obtained by using power simulations performed on representative circuits with several different Trojan circuitry. These results show that Trojans that are 3-4 orders of magnitude smaller than the main circuit can be detected by signal processing techniques. While scaling our technique to detect even smaller Trojans in complex ICs with tens or hundreds of millions of transistors would require certain modifications to the IC design process, our results provide a starting point to address this important problem.

Hardware Trojan detection using path delay fingerprint

Abstract: Trusted IC design is a recently emerged topic since fabrication factories are moving worldwide in order to reduce cost. In order to get a low-cost but effective hardware trojan detection method to complement traditional testing methods, a new behavior-oriented category method is proposed to divide trojans into two categories: explicit payload trojan and implicit payload trojan. This categorization method makes it possible to construct trojan models and then lower the cost of testing. Path delays of nominal chips are collected to construct a series of fingerprints, each one representing one aspect of the total characteristics of a genuine design. Chips are validated by comparing their delay parameters to the fingerprints. The comparison of path delays makes small trojan circuits significant from a delay point of view. The experimentpsilas results show that the detection rate on explicit payload trojans is 100%, while this method should be developed further if used to detect implicit payload trojans.

Reflections on trusting trust

Abstract: To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.