Effect of hardware Trojans on the performance of a coded communication system

Pernicious Trojan circuits inserted during the design or fabrication phases of an integrated circuit may cause undesirable effects in the designed system. In the case of communication systems, incorrect decoding of the received information is an issue that may lead to serious consequences. In this paper, we study the performance degradation of a noisy coded communication system, due to the presence of hardware Trojans in the decoding unit. It can be seen that the Trojans have negligible effect at low SNRs while there is a statistically significant increase in the bit error rate (p < 0.01) at higher SNRs. At high SNRs, we expect the bit error rate to tend towards zero, but it is observed that even with the Trojan being activated only once during the entire duration of the transmission, there is a constant bit error rate of the order of 10−4.

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