Design and Analysis of Hardware Trojan Threats in Reconfigurable Hardware

Hardware Trojan (HT) is increasingly becoming a major threat that risks to the security of modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) industry. An adversary intentionally makes some modifications to the IC design with an objective to cause operational failure, denial of service or to leak valuable information from the IC. To facilitate research work in this area, a better understanding of what various types of hardware Trojans would look like and what impact they would incur to an IC design is required. In this paper, various types of HTs are designed at Register Transfer Level (RTL) and what impacts caused by these Trojans inserted into an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) crypto module which is implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is analyzed. Furthermore, two countermeasure techniques are also employed to strengthen hardware implementation against HT insertion in the RTL design.