A Novel Use of Approximate Circuits to Thwart Hardware Trojan Insertion and Provide Obfuscation

Hardware Trojans have become in the last decade a major threat in the Integrated Circuit industry. Many techniques have been proposed in the literature aiming at detecting such malicious modifications in fabricated ICs. For the most critical circuits, prevention methods are also of interest. The goal of such methods is to prevent the insertion of a Hardware Trojan thanks to ad-hoc design rules. In this paper, we present a novel prevention technique based on approximation. An approximate logic circuit is a circuit that performs a possibly different but closely related logic function, so that it can be used for error detection or error masking where it overlaps with the original circuit. We will show how this technique can successfully detect the presence of Hardware Trojans, with a solution that has a smaller impact than triplication.