Hardware Trojans in fdSOI

IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), vol. 26, pp. 1–6

Abstract

With shortening turn-around times and increasing complexity for digital circuits, design reuse, third party IP and today even physical chiplets has increased. Malicious actors have more options to introduce hardware backdoors to packaged systems, which will leak data if triggered. In this work, we show two novel approaches to introduce such backdoors, that are possible due to the specifics of fully depleted silicon on insulator (fdSOI) technology. The first method relies on modifying the doping profile of an antenna cell to introduce a covert short between the back gate and logic signals. The second method constructs specific illegal states which are latched when the clock is running with the trigger frequency. Basic test structures have been designed such that they are DRC and STA clean. LVS does not reveal the hidden structure, while measurements in silicon confirm their operation.

Authors 4

1. Christian Lanius Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

2. Florian Freye Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Shutao Zhang Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

4. Tobias Gemmeke Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany