LAUSR

Hardware trojan (HT) is increasingly becoming a major threat in the integrated circuit (IC) industry. Among all the countermeasures, academia is currently paying their most attention to the side-channel ones. However, most of the existing side-channel countermeasures need fabricated golden chips that are difficult to obtain practically. In this article, we propose a novel strategy for HT detection using the target chip’s quiescent thermal maps and its active area (AA) shape from the GDS II file. The AA shape cannot expose the design information of the target chip and serves as the golden reference, which means that our countermeasure does not need fabricated golden chips anymore. In addition, this countermeasure cannot be influenced by process variation (PV) from the perspective of our detection mechanism. The results of the experiment on our designed YinHeFeiTeng-digital signal processor (YHFT-DSP) indicate that our countermeasure can effectively detect trojans with a very small scale.