CAREER: Designing and Defending Novel Ultra-stealthy and Controllable Design-time Analog-domain Hardware Trojans

Hardware designers build circuits leveraging the digital abstraction where only values 1 and 0 exist. While this simplifies circuit operation, it hides a lot of real-world operational details. In the real world, circuits behave continuously, with voltages ranging between 0 and some higher level.

Voltage fluctuates in the short- and long-term due to the operating environment changes, circuit age, and computation. Traditionally, both hardware designers and attackers have ignored these low-level details. This project shows that it is possible to harness these low-level behaviors, using existing digital design techniques, to create new hardware attacks and proposes defenses to counteract them.

This project changes how hardware designers across government and industry reason about and validate the security of their designs. By exploiting analog-domain effects for increased stealth, the project represents a fundamental change in the capabilities of hardware Trojans. Two significant outcomes of the project are a new dimension of hardware Trojan stealth, namely reproducibility, and exposing the ability to harness analog-domain properties at the hardware description language level.

The artifacts of this project are a Field-Programmable Gate Array-based System-on-Chip that demonstrates the novel analog-domain hardware Trojans as well as serves as a defense evaluation platform, representative of commodity systems.

This project brings together research in the areas of computer security, computer architecture, and digital circuits to create novel design-time hardware Trojans and new defenses against them. Other broader impacts include extending the technical work's impact to society, developing partnerships with government labs and industry, and providing mentorship to the next generation of leaders, especially those who are the first in their family to get a college degree.

The project will also play a role in undergraduate and graduate education through the integration of the research artifacts into the curriculum and the creation of an embedded security design experience.

The project repository will be indefinitely available to the public https://github.com/FoRTE-Research/NSF_CAREER. This repository will contain the code for all hardware and software systems need to reproduce and extend the research results. Experimental data will be stored on the laboratory devices where the simulation and experiments are conducted, as well as being backed-up using external media for archival storage.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.