On trojan side channel design and identification

Trojan side channels (TSCs) are serious threats to the security of cryptographic systems because they facilitate to leak secret keys to attackers via covert side channels that are unknown to designers. To tackle this problem, we present a new hardware Trojan detection technique for TSCs. To be specific, we first investigate general power-based TSC designs and discuss the tradeoff between their hardware cost and the complexity of the key cracking process. Next, we present our TSC identification technique based on the correlation between the key and the covert physical side channels used by attackers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.