EqSA: A Golden-IC Free Equal Power Self-Authentication for Hardware Trojan Detection

Due to outsourcing of numerous stages of IC manufacturing process in different foundries, the security risk such as hardware Trojan becomes a potential threat. This work presents a power based side-channel analysis framework, which magnifies the detection sensitivity and does not rely on a Golden IC. This method exhibits design for security (DFS) addressing scan chain partitioning and segmentation technique for scalability. An equal-power self-referencing approach is proposed in order to detect Trojans. The detection process uses parametric comparison of at least two neighboring regions, which consumes equal power for a set of selected patterns. We generate launch-on-capture test patterns and apply them with modification so as to restrict the switching activities (noises) from other regions. A theoretical analysis in the presence of die-to-die and intra-die process variations with the help of other existing methods is addressed. In our experiments, conducted for both combinational and sequential small Trojan circuits, we report a high detection rate thus substantiating its effectiveness in realizing an equal power self-authentication technique which is independent of any Golden IC.