Designing stealthy Trojans with sequential logic: A stream cipher case study

This paper describes how a stealthy Trojan circuit can be inserted into a stream cipher module. The stream cipher utilizes several shift register-like structures to implement the keystream generator and to process the encrypted text. We demonstrate how an effective trigger can be built with the addi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2014 51st ACM/EDAC/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) pp. 1 - 4
Main Authors Rudra, Mukesh Reddy, Daniel, Nimmy Anna, Nagoorkar, Varun, Hoe, David H. K.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.06.2014
Subjects
Ciphers
Encryption
Hardware
hardware trojan
Logic gates
sequential-based Trojan
Shift registers
stream cipher
Trojan horses
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Summary:This paper describes how a stealthy Trojan circuit can be inserted into a stream cipher module. The stream cipher utilizes several shift register-like structures to implement the keystream generator and to process the encrypted text. We demonstrate how an effective trigger can be built with the addition of just a few logic gates inserted between the shift registers and one additional flip-flop. By distributing the inserted Trojan logic both temporally and over the logic design space, the malicious circuit is hard to detect by both conventional and more recent static analysis methods. The payload is designed to weaken the cipher strength, making it more susceptible to cryptanalysis by an adversary.
ISSN:0738-100X
DOI:10.1145/2593069.2596677