HATE: a HArdware Trojan Emulation Environment for Microprocessor-based Systems

The constant quest of low production cost and short time-to-market, together with the growing complexity of integrated circuits led to the globalization of the supply chain of silicon devices. One of the threats related to such a supply chain are Hardware Trojan Horses (HWTs), that, in the last years, became a serious issue not only for academy but also for industry. Although a large number of methodologies for HWTs prevention, detection and tolerance have been proposed, there is a lack of well-recognized methods and metrics to evaluate their effectiveness. In this paper we present HATE1, a HArdware Trojan Emulation Environment. The goal of HATE is twofold: (i) the tool can be used to analyse whether a given HWT (or a given set of HWTs) is activated by a software running on a microprocessor, and (ii) it can be used to assess HWTs detection techniques in microprocessors against a set of generated HWTs (either randomly or not). HATE represents, in our vision, a step towards the definition of a reference benchmarking scenario, to provide a comparative ground for evaluating different proposals focusing on HWT detection/tolerance. A subset of MiBench programs have been used to analyse the efficiency of HATE.