Non-Deterministic Timers for Hardware Trojan Activation (Or How a Little Randomness Can Go the Wrong Way)

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Frank Imeson, Saeed Nejati, Siddharth Garg, and Mahesh V. Tripunitara

The security of digital Integrated Circuits (ICs) is essential to the security of a computer system that comprises them. A particularly pernicious attack is the insertion of a hardware backdoor, that is triggered in the field using a timer that is also inserted in the hardware. Prior work has addressed deterministic timer-based triggers—those that are designed to trigger at a specific time with probability.