Toward Building and Optimizing Trustworthy Systems Using Untrusted Components: A Graph-Theoretic Perspective

The globalization process for integrated circuits (ICs) raises serious concerns regarding hardware Trojans (HTs). Due to the stealth and variety of HTs, detecting them at test time can be very resource intensive. This situation becomes even worse when the device under test (DUT) contains untrusted third-party intellectual property (3PIP) cores. For systems on chip (SoCs) that rely on untrusted 3PIP cores, this article solves the online HT detection and recovery problem from a graph-theoretic perspective. The proposed graph-theoretic models minimize the implementation cost of the system in terms of both the cost of purchasing different IP cores and the area overhead. To further enhance the security of the system, we also propose schemes to locate and replace an HT-infected IP core. The feasibility and efficiency of the proposed techniques are verified by experiments.