Bomberman: Defining and Defeating Hardware Ticking Timebombs at Design-time

Abstract

To cope with ever-increasing design complexities, integrated circuit designers increase both the size of their design teams and their reliance on third-party intellectual property (IP). Both come at the expense of trust: it is computationally infeasible to exhaustively verify that a design is free of all possible malicious modifications (i.e., hardware Trojans). Making matters worse, unlike software, hardware modifications are permanent: there is no "patching" mechanism for hardware; and powerful: they serve as a foothold for subverting software that sits above.To counter this threat, prior work uses both static and dynamic analysis techniques to verify hardware designs are Trojan-free. Unfortunately, researchers continue to reveal weaknesses in these "one-size-fits-all", heuristic-based approaches. Instead of attempting to detect all possible hardware Trojans, we take the first step in addressing the hardware Trojan threat in a divide-and-conquer fashion: defining and eliminating Ticking Timebomb Trojans (TTTs), forcing attackers to implement larger Trojan designs detectable via existing verification and side-channel defenses. Like many system-level software defenses (e.g., Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP)), our goal is to systematically constrict the hardware attacker’s design space.First, we construct a definition of TTTs derived from their functional behavior. Next, we translate this definition into fundamental components required to realize TTT behavior in hardware. Using these components, we expand the set of all known TTTs to a total of six variants—including unseen variants. Leveraging our definition, we design and implement a TTT-specific dynamic verification toolchain extension, called Bomber-man. Using four real-world hardware designs, we demonstrate Bomberman’s ability to detect all TTT variants, where previous defenses fail, with <1.2% false positives.