FlowTrojan: Insertion and Detection of Hardware Trojans on Flow-Based Microfluidic Biochips

We propose FlowTrojan, the first systematic framework for insertion and detection of Hardware Trojans (HTs) on Flow-based Microfluidic Biochips (FMFBs). The FMFB is an emerging platform with critical usages in the medical field due to the handling of sensitive information. We discuss the attack model where the malicious foundry aims to compromise the on-chip control circuitry. FlowTrojan is designed to automatically extract the netlist for the control circuitry from the layout and explore the internal independence between regions on FMFBs for partitioning. We demonstrate that HT triggers can feature a low activation probability while placed on the non-critical timing path to stay clandestine during functional and parametric testing. To avoid such attacks, FlowTrojan provides a parallel regime of control-value (CV) based HT detection as the countermeasure. Experimental results corroborate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed attack and detection schemes.