On Reliability Trojan Injection and Detection

Hardware design houses are increasingly outsourcing designs to be manufactured by cheaper fabrication facilities due to economic factors and market forces. This raises the question of trustable manufactured products for highly sensitive applications. One such type of trust issue is the possible incorporation of Trojan circuits into the IC with the goal of tampering with IC reliability and hastening the aging of the chip. In this paper we present examples of such reliability Trojans and describe testing approaches for detecting these reliability tampering attempts. Counter measures that can be taken by these Trojans to avoid being detected and an example of a counter–counter measure are also described.