Paper 2016/1004

Private Circuits III: Hardware Trojan-Resilience via Testing Amplification

Stefan Dziembowski, Sebastian Faust, and Francois-Xavier Standaert

Abstract

Security against hardware trojans is currently becoming an essential ingredient to ensure trust in information systems. A variety of solutions have been introduced to reach this goal, ranging from reactive (i.e., detection-based) to preventive (i.e., trying to make the insertion of a trojan more difficult for the adversary). In this paper, we show how testing (which is a typical detection tool) can be used to state concrete security guarantees for preventive approaches to trojan-resilience. For this purpose, we build on and formalize two important previous works which introduced ``input scrambling" and ``split manufacturing" as countermeasures to hardware trojans. Using these ingredients, we present a generic compiler that can transform any circuit into a trojan-resilient one, for which we can state quantitative security guarantees on the number of correct executions of the circuit thanks to a new tool denoted as ``testing amplification". Compared to previous works, our threat model covers an extended range of hardware trojans while we stick with the goal of minimizing the number of honest elements in our transformed circuits. Since transformed circuits essentially correspond to redundant multiparty computations of the target functionality, they also allow reasonably efficient implementations, which can be further optimized if specialized to certain cryptographic primitives and security goals.

Note: An extended version of the paper that appears in the ACM CCS'16 proceedings. The 2020 update of this paper fixes a bug in the statement of Theorem 1.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Keywords
hardware trojan horsessecure multiparty computations
Contact author(s)
stefan dziembowski @ gmail com
History
2020-11-25: revised
2016-10-26: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/1004
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/1004,
      author = {Stefan Dziembowski and Sebastian Faust and Francois-Xavier Standaert},
      title = {Private Circuits {III}: Hardware Trojan-Resilience via Testing Amplification},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/1004},
      year = {2016},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1004}
}
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