Revisiting Black-Hat HLS: A Lightweight Countermeasure to HLS-Aided Trojan Attack

Abstract

One of the dark side of horizontal semiconductor business model could be the supply of compromised computer aided design (CAD) tools by an adversary to the designers. A compromised or black-hat high level synthesis (HLS) tool may secretly insert Trojan into the design being synthesized to affect its functional or non-functional aspects. Recently, a black-hat HLS was presented which inserts fake operations during the scheduling process to enable battery exhaustion attack. In this paper, we present a framework to detect the fake operations inserted by a compromised HLS with the help of scheduling information provided by the tool. We implemented our detection framework on a number of benchmarks and analyzed the detection time and accuracy. We also analyzed the cost of fake operation insertion in terms of design area and delay overhead. IEEE