Towards Trust Hardware Deployment of Edge Computing: Mitigation of Hardware Trojans Based on Evolvable Hardware

Abstract

Hardware Trojans (HTs) are malicious hardware components designed to leak confidential information or cause the chip/circuit on which they are integrated to malfunction during operation. When we deploy such hardware platforms for edge computing, FPGA-based implementations of Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) are also currently falling victim to HT insertion. However, for CGRA, an evolvable hardware (EHW) platform, which has the ability to dynamically change its configuration and behavioral characteristics based on inputs from the environment, provides us with a new way to mitigate HT attacks. In this regard, we investigate the feasibility of using EHW to mitigate HTs that disrupt normal functionality in CGRA in this paper. When it is determined that HT is inserted into certain processing elements (PEs), the array autonomously reconfigures the circuit structure based on an evolutionary algorithm (EA) to avoid the use of HT-infected (HT-I) PEs. We show that the proposed approach is applicable to: (1) hardware platforms that support coarse-grained reconfiguration; and (2) pure combinatorial circuits. In a simulation environment built in Python, this paper reports experimental results for two target evolutionary circuits and outlines the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords

• evolvable hardware (EHW) at edge
• coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA)
• hardware security
• hardware trojan (HT)
• field-programmable gate array (FPGA)