A Trusted Design Platform for Trojan Detection in FPGA Bitstreams Using Partial Reconfiguration

‎Hardware Trojans have emerged as a major concern for integrated circuits in recent years‎. ‎As a result‎, ‎detecting Trojans has become an important issue in critical applications‎, ‎such as finance and health‎. ‎The Trojan detection methods are mainly categorized into functional and side channel based ones‎. ‎To increase the capability of both mentioned detection methods‎, ‎one can increase the transition activity of the circuit‎. ‎This paper proposes a trusted platform for detecting Trojans in FPGA bitstreams‎. ‎The proposed methodology takes advantage of increased Trojan activation‎, ‎caused by transition aware partitioning of the circuit‎. ‎Meanwhile‎, ‎it benefits partial reconfiguration feature of FPGAs to reduce area overhead‎. ‎Experimental studies on the mapped version of s38417 ISCAS89 benchmark show that for the transition probability thresholds of 10^{4} and 2*10^{5}‎, ‎our method increases the ratio of the number of transitions (TCTCR) in the Trojan circuit by about 290.93% and 131.48%‎, ‎respectively‎, ‎compared to the unpartitioned circuit‎. ‎Similar experiments on s15850 for the transition probability thresholds of 10^{4} and 2*10^{5} show an increase of 290.26% and 203.11% in TCTCR‎, ‎respectively. Furthermore‎, ‎this method improves the functional Trojan detection capability due to a significant increase in the ratio of observing wrong results in primary outputs‎.