Advanced techniques for designing stealthy hardware trojans

The necessity of detecting malicious modifications in hardware designs has led to the development of various detection tools. Trojan detection approaches aim to reveal compromised designs using several methods such as static code analysis, side-channel dynamic signal analysis, design for testing, verification, and monitoring architectures etc. This paper demonstrates new approaches for circumventing some of the latest Trojan detection techniques. We introduce and implement stealthy Trojans designs that do not violate the functional specifications of the corresponding original models. The designs chosen to demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques correspond to encryption algorithms and a pseudo random number generator. The proposed Trojans are inserted into the original RTL, and decrease the overall security of the designs, minimizing detection probability by state-of-the-art static analysis tools.