Study on Hardware Trojan

 R.I.P

The Final Year Project interim report

Ezio Cheung

Table of Content

Introduction……………………………………..1.1

Background……………………………………..1.2

Objective………………………………………...1.3

Weekly Progress………………………………..2.1

Discovery and Founding……...………………..2.2

The Next Step………………………………..…4.1

Feeling…………………………………………..4.2

Sample Code…………………………………...4.3

References……………………………………...5.4

Introduction

Our group name is “RIP” which stands for “requiescat in pace” in Latin.

The subject of the project is study on hardware Trojan.

Background

Trojan should not be a strange malware name for modern day’s computing, even for normal user. It is a small data size malicious program which will stay hidden and not being discoverable inside the computer system on the software system level, sometimes even cannot be detected by antivirus software.

 The Trojan itself can be triggered by some certain pre-setup input or a certain pre-configured time, on some condition even though the Trojan has been triggered, but the program itself can be so well hidden inside the hard drive.

This is the reason why it always gaining attention so much, the whole computer community and developer are spending uncountable amount of effort and time into finding a possible solution and countermeasure to deal with the Trojan malware and its existence.

However, speaking of hardware Trojan, the computer community even the hardware manufacturer was not aware of this problem or simply just applying some measurement which are obviously outdated.

Objective

The objective of this project is to study the background and nature of the hardware Trojan specific targeted to hardware which written in hardware define language (HDL). And comes up with the possible solution and counter-measure of this issue.