DISTROY: Detecting Integrated Circuit Trojans with Compressive Measurements

Detecting Trojans in an integrated circuit (IC) is an important but hard problem. A Trojan is malicious hardware—it can be extremely small in size and dormant until triggered by some unknown circuit state. To allow wake-up, a Trojan could draw a minimal amount of power, for example, to run a clock or a state machine, or to monitor a triggering event. We introduce DISTROY (Discover Trojan), a new approach that can efficiently and reliably detect extremely small background power leakage that a Trojan creates and as a result, we can detect the Trojan. We formulate our method based on compressive sensing, a recent advance in signal processing, which can recover a signal using the number of measurements approximately proportional to its sparsity rather than size. We argue that circuit states in which the Trojan background power consumption stands out are rare, and thus sparse, so that we can apply compressive sensing. We describe how this is done in DISTROY so as to afford sufficient measurement statistics to detect the presence of Trojans. Finally, we present our initial simulation results that validate DISTROY and discuss the impact of our work in the field of hardware security.