Self Aware SoC Security to Counteract Delay Inducing Hardware Trojans at Runtime

A major issue of present age system on chip (SoC) designing is meeting of stringent time to market deadlines along with the reduction of various challenges faced during design. A significant strategy adopted in tackling such a problem is to procure different components or IPs (intellectual properties) of the SoC from different third party IP vendors (3PIPs). Such a technique targets independent working of the SoC components and removes the threat of the occurrence of malicious circuitry or Hardware Trojan Horse (HTH) having a distributed architecture. However, trustworthiness of the 3PIP vendors is a concern and possibility exists in the implantation of a HTH in the individual IPs procured from them. In this work, we analyze the effects of such Trojans, which may induce sudden unintentional delays at runtime, affecting the basic security principles of the SoC. We propose a self aware approach which works on the observe-decide-act (ODA) paradigm to counteract the scenario. Existing literature on hardware security generally focus on detection of anomaly, but is silent on organizing low level security mechanisms in such a manner that the high level objective of secure task completion is facilitated at run time. Our proposed methodology not only overcomes this limitation but also ensures security without tampering the IP designs. Experimental analysis is performed using AES crypto SoC architecture. Low overhead in area and power of the security elements as obtained in experimentation supports its applicability for practical SoC applications.