TY - JOUR
T1 - Black-Hat High-Level Synthesis
T2 - Myth or Reality?
AU - Pilato, Christian
AU - Basu, Kanad
AU - Regazzoni, Francesco
AU - Karri, Ramesh
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received June 9, 2018; revised October 11, 2018; accepted November 19, 2018. Date of publication December 25, 2018; date of current version March 20, 2019. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Award 1526405. (Corresponding author: Christian Pilato.) C. Pilato is with the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Bioingeg-neria, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy (e-mail: christian.pilato@ polimi.it). K. Basu and R. Karri are with the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, New York University, New York, NY 10003 USA. F. Regazzoni is with the Advanced Learning and Research Institute, Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland. Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVLSI.2018.2884742
Publisher Copyright:
© 1993-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2019/4
Y1 - 2019/4
N2 - Hardware Trojans are a major concern for integrated circuits. All parts of the electronics supply chain are vulnerable to this threat. Trojans can be inserted directly by a rogue employee or through a compromised computer-aided design tool at each step of the design cycle, including an alteration of the design files in the early stages and the fabrication process in a third-party malicious foundry. While Trojan insertion during the latter stages has been largely investigated, we focus on high-level synthesis (HLS) tools as a likely attack vector. HLS tools are used to generate intellectual property blocks from high-level specifications. To demonstrate the threat, we compromised an open-source HLS tool to inject three examples of HLS-aided hardware Trojans with functional and nonfunctional effects. Our results show that a black-hat HLS tool can be successfully used to maliciously alter electronic circuits to add latency, drain energy, or undermine the security of cryptographic hardware cores. This threat is an important security concern to address.
AB - Hardware Trojans are a major concern for integrated circuits. All parts of the electronics supply chain are vulnerable to this threat. Trojans can be inserted directly by a rogue employee or through a compromised computer-aided design tool at each step of the design cycle, including an alteration of the design files in the early stages and the fabrication process in a third-party malicious foundry. While Trojan insertion during the latter stages has been largely investigated, we focus on high-level synthesis (HLS) tools as a likely attack vector. HLS tools are used to generate intellectual property blocks from high-level specifications. To demonstrate the threat, we compromised an open-source HLS tool to inject three examples of HLS-aided hardware Trojans with functional and nonfunctional effects. Our results show that a black-hat HLS tool can be successfully used to maliciously alter electronic circuits to add latency, drain energy, or undermine the security of cryptographic hardware cores. This threat is an important security concern to address.
KW - Hardware Trojan
KW - high-level synthesis (HLS)
KW - intellectual property (IP)
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U2 - 10.1109/TVLSI.2018.2884742
DO - 10.1109/TVLSI.2018.2884742
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85059286395
SN - 1063-8210
VL - 27
SP - 913
EP - 926
JO - IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
JF - IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
IS - 4
M1 - 8588362
ER -