Thermal images based Hardware Trojan detection through differential temperature matrix

Abstract Insertions of Hardware Trojan result in unexpected harm to integrated circuits, and will change the characteristics of integrated circuits, such as thermal characteristics. In this paper, we proposed a Hardware Trojan detection method based on differential temperature matrix analysis. The matrix includes 750 differential thermal images data which were obtained from two differences between the testing chips and the golden chip, and the matrix shows each pixel’s differential temperature value from thermal image and provides a novel insight to investigate the impact of Trojan. During experiment procedure, many programmable heating modules were distributed in chips to interfere with Trojan detection. Experimental results show that Trojan insertion could increase the differential temperature, and expand the density distribution of differential temperature at the same time. The proposed method can achieve effective and accurate detection result, Trojan with only a logical gate size has been detected and located in two proportions of logic units occupied between Trojan and programmable heating modules, the proportions are 0.45% and 0.29%, respectively.