Integrated sensor: a backdoor for hardware Trojan insertions?

XT Ng, Z Naj, S Bhasin, DB Roy…�- …�conference on digital�…, 2015 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
2015 Euromicro conference on digital system design, 2015ieeexplore.ieee.org
Embedded system face a serious threat from physical attacks when applied in critical
applications. Therefore, modern systems have several integrated sensors to detect potential
threats. In this paper, we put forward a new issue where these sensors can open other
security loopholes. We demonstrate that sensors, which are deployed to prevent faults, can
be exploited to insert effective and almost zero-overhead hardware Trojans. Two case
studies are presented on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The first case study exploits the in-build�…
Embedded system face a serious threat from physical attacks when applied in critical applications. Therefore, modern systems have several integrated sensors to detect potential threats. In this paper, we put forward a new issue where these sensors can open other security loopholes. We demonstrate that sensors, which are deployed to prevent faults, can be exploited to insert effective and almost zero-overhead hardware Trojans. Two case studies are presented on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The first case study exploits the in-build temperature sensor of Virtex-5 system monitors while the other exploits a user deployed sensor. Both the sensor can be used to trigger a powerful Trojan with minimal and at times zero overhead.
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