To prevent, detect and combat hardware Trojans, computer scientists from the University of California San Diego, together with their collaborators, have devised a new technique that tracks information flow through a circuit’s logic gates, much the way one would track traffic as it flows through an intersection while obeying a series of traffic signals.
If information unexpectedly moves to a part of the chip where it shouldn’t be, the method will determine that a security violation occurred, and whether or not a Trojan was the root cause.