High-Level Synthesis of Benevolent Trojans

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) allows designers to create a register transfer level (RTL) description of a digital circuit starting from its high-level specification (e.g., C/C++/SystemC). HLS reduces engineering effort and design-time errors, allowing the integration of additional features. This study introduces an approach to generate benevolent Hardware Trojans (HT) using HLS. Benevolent HTs are Intellectual Property (IP) watermarks that borrow concepts from well-known malicious HTs to ward off piracy and counterfeiting either during the design flow or in fielded integrated circuits. Benevolent HTs are difficult to detect and remove because they are intertwined with the functional units used to implement the IP. Experimental results testify to the suitability of the approach and the limited overhead.