On the Difficulty of Inserting Trojans in Reversible Computing Architectures

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Xiaotong Cui, Samah Saeed, Alwin Zulehner, Robert Wille, Rolf Drechsler, Kaijie Wu and Ramesh Karri

Fabrication-less design houses outsource their designs to 3rd party foundries to lower fabrication cost. However, this creates opportunities for a rogue in the foundry to introduce hardware Trojans, which stay inactive most of the time and cause unintended consequences to the system when triggered. Hardware Trojans in traditional CMOS-based circuits have been studied and Design-for-Trust (DFT) techniques have been proposed to detect them. Different from traditional circuits in many ways, reversible circuits implement one-to-one, bijective input/output mappings.