Trojan

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

Thwarting Security Threats From Malicious FPGA Tools With Novel FPGA-Oriented Moving Target Defense

Abstract: The increasing usage and popularity of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) systems bring in security concerns. Existing countermeasures are mostly based on the assumption that the computer-aided design (CAD) tools for FPGA configuration are trusted. Unfortunately, this assumption does not always hold. In this paper, we investigate the potential security threats originated from the untrusted CAD tools. Furthermore, we exploit the principle of moving target defense (MTD) to propose an FPGA-oriented MTD (FOMTD) method. The three defense lines in the FOMTD generate uncertainties, from the attacker’s point of view, to thwart hardware Trojan insertion attacks. The theoretical upper bound of the hardware Trojan hit rate for each defense line is provided in this paper. Experimental results show that the proposed defense line 2 and defense line 3 reduce the Trojan hit rate by up to 40% and 91%, respectively, for the scenario where the malicious CAD tool can insert Trojans in the occupied FPGA slices. The proposed gate replacement technique in the defense line 3 further improves the attack resilience and obtains 88% reduction on the Trojan hit rate. Compared to the static redundancy-based Trojan detection method, the proposed method achieves better resilience against Trojan insertions and consumes 50% less dynamic power.

Real-time trust evaluation in integrated circuits

Abstract: The use of side-channel measurements and fingerprinting, in conjunction with statistical analysis, has proven to be the most effective method for accurately detecting hardware Trojans in fabricated integrated circuits. However, these post-fabrication trust evaluation methods overlook the capabilities of advanced design skills that attackers can use in designing sophisticated Trojans. To this end, we have designed a Trojan using power-gating techniques and demonstrate that it can be masked from advanced side-channel fingerprinting detection while dormant. We then propose a real-time trust evaluation framework that continuously monitors the on-board global power consumption to monitor chip trustworthiness. The measurements obtained corroborate our frameworks effectiveness for detecting Trojans. Finally, the results presented are experimentally verified by performing measurements on fabricated Trojan-free and Trojan-infected variants of a reconfigurable linear feedback shift register (LFSR) array.

Designing hardware trojans and their detection based on a SVM-based approach

Abstract: Since hardware production become inexpensive and international, hardware vendors often outsource their products to third-party vendors. Due to the situation, malicious vendors can easily insert malfunctions (also known as “hardware Trojans”) to their products. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate a machine-learning-based hardware-Trojan detection method using several hardware Trojans we designed. To begin with, we design three types of hardware Trojans and insert them to simple RS232 transceiver circuits. After that, we learn known netlists, where we know which nets are Trojan ones or normal ones beforehand, using a machine-learning-based hardware-Trojan detection method with a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Finally, we classify the nets in the designed hardware-Trojan-inserted netlists into a set of Trojan nets and that of normal nets using the learned classifier. The experimental results demonstrate that the hardware-Trojan detection method with the SVM-based approach can detect a part of hardware Trojans we designed.

The Trojan Method in Functional Encryption: From Selective to Adaptive Security, Generically.

Abstract: In a functional encryption (FE) scheme, the owner of the secret key can generate restricted decryption keys that allow users to learn specific functions of the encrypted messages and nothing else. In many known constructions of FE schemes, such a notion of security is guaranteed only for messages that are fixed ahead of time (i.e., before the adversary even interacts with the system). This is called selective security, which is too restrictive for many realistic applications. Achieving adaptive security (also called full security), where security is guaranteed even for messages that are adaptively chosen at any point in time, seems significantly more challenging. The handful of known fully-secure schemes are based on specifically tailored techniques that rely on strong assumptions (such as obfuscation assumptions or multilinear maps assumptions). In this paper we show that any sufficiently expressive selectively-secure FE scheme can be transformed into a fully secure one without introducing any additional assumptions. We present a direct black-box transformation, making novel use of hybrid encryption, a classical technique that was originally introduced for improving the efficiency of encryption schemes, combined with a new technique we call the Trojan Method. This method allows to embed a secret execution thread in the functional keys of the underlying scheme, which will only be activated within the proof of security of the resulting scheme. As another application of the Trojan Method, we show how to construct functional encryption schemes for arbitrary circuits starting from ones for shallow circuits (NC1 or even TC0). ∗E-mail: prabhanjan@cs.ucla.edu. This work was done while visiting MIT, and was supported in part by the Northrop Grumman Cybersecurity Consortium. †E-mail: zvika.brakerski@weizmann.ac.il. Supported by an Alon Fellowship and by ISF. ‡E-mail: segev@cs.huji.ac.il. Supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) via a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 483/13), and by the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence (I-CORE) Program (Center No. 4/11). §Email: vinodv@mit.edu. Research supported in part by DARPA Grant number FA8750-11-2-0225, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Northrop Grumman Cybersecurity Research Consortium (CRC), the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, and a Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Chair from MIT.

Characterization of kepler-91b and the investigation of a potential trojan companion using exonest

Abstract: Presented here is an independent re-analysis of the Kepler light curve of Kepler-91 (KIC 8219268). Using the EXONEST software package, which provides both Bayesian parameter estimation and Bayesian model testing, we were able to re-confirm the planetary nature of Kepler-91b. In addition to the primary and secondary eclipses of Kepler-91b, a third dimming event appears to occur approximately $60^o$ away (in phase) from the secondary eclipse, leading to the hypothesis that a Trojan planet may be located at the L4 or L5 Lagrange points. Here, we present a comprehensive investigation of four possibilities to explain the observed dimming event using all available photometric data from the Kepler Space Telescope, recently obtained radial velocity measurements, and N-body simulations. We find that the photometric model describing Kepler-91b and a Trojan planet is highly favored over the model involving Kepler-91b alone. However, it predicts an unphysically high temperature for the Trojan companion, leading to the conclusion that the extra dimming event is likely a false-postive.