Building Trustworthy Systems Using Untrusted Components: A High-Level Synthesis Approach

Trustworthiness of system-on-chip designs is undermined by malicious logic (Trojans) in third-party intellectual properties (3PIPs). In this paper, duplication, diversity, and isolation principles have been extended to detect build trustworthy systems using untrusted, potentially Trojan-infected 3PIPs. We use a diverse set of vendors to prevent collusions between the 3PIPs from the same vendor. We identify design constraints for Trojan detection to achieving detection, collusion prevention, and isolating the Trojan-infected 3PIP, and incorporate them during high-level synthesis. In addition, we develop techniques to reduce the number of vendors. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is validated using the high-level synthesis benchmarks.