Why We Should Be Scared of Hardware Trojans

Institutskolloquium

  • Datum: 23.04.2021
  • Uhrzeit: 10:30 - 12:30
  • Vortragender: Prof. Dr. Christof Paar
  • Ort: Zoom Meeting Room 5
  • Raum: Zoom Meeting
  • Gastgeber: IPP
  • Kontakt: daniel.told@ipp.mpg.de

Computer hardware provides the ultimate building blocks that enables the evolution towards the digital society. At the same time, manipulations at the IC level can compromise the security of the entire system. From an adversarial point of view, such attacks have the “advantage” that they tend to be almost impossible to detect, which is part of the current controversy about Chinese-built equipment, e.g., from Huawei. We also know from the Snowden revelations that hardware Trojans are a realistic tool in the arsenal of large-scale adversaries.

Even though hardware Trojans have been studied for a decade or so in the literature, little is known about how they might look, especially those that are particularly designed to avoid detection. We will present some of our reserach results related to low-level hardware Trojans. With respect to general integrated circuits, we'll show how manipulation of the doping concentration of selected transistors can lead to a total loss of security on the system level. For FPGA, i.e., reconfigurable hardware devices, we'll show how low-level programming information can also to very stealthy and dangerous attacks.


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