Abstract
In this paper, we consider the problem of testing integrated circuits (ICs) to check for the presence of hardware Trojans from a game theoretic perspective. Under consideration of complex cost structures involved in the testing process, the paper analytically characterizes the Nash Equilibrium (NE) strategy of a malicious manufacturer for inserting a hardware Trojan into a manufactured IC and that of a defender for testing the acquired IC to check for the presence of Trojans. The paper first considers the defender, who incurs testing costs, to be capable of testing one Trojan type and analytically characterizes the NE of such a scenario. The paper also considers the scenario where the defender can test an IC to check for the presence of multiple types of Trojans under a cost budget constraint and analytically characterizes the NE of such a game. Numerous numerical results are presented in the paper that provide important insights into the game theoretic strategies presented.
This work was supported in part by the NSF under Award Number HRD 1912414 and in part by the Air Force under PIA FA8750-19-3-1000.
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Notes
- 1.
In other words, for such a strategy profile, there exists \(i, j \in \{1,\cdots ,N\}\) for which \(\gamma _i(p_i) \ne \gamma _j(p_j)\).
- 2.
Note that in the strategy \(\mathbf {p'}\), \(\delta _w c_w\) is the additional cost incurred by the defender due to the increase in the probability of testing Trojan type w and \(\delta _z c_z\) is the decrease in cost incurred due to the decrease in the probability of testing Trojan type z.
- 3.
Note, it is easy to show that, for strategies \(\grave{\mathbf {p}} = (\grave{p}_1,\cdots ,\grave{p}_N)\) (where \(\sum _{i=1}^N \grave{p}_ic_i < C\)) and \(\acute{\mathbf {p}} = (\acute{p}_1,\cdots ,\acute{p}_N)\) (where \(\sum _{i=1}^N \acute{p}_ic_i = C\)) of the defender, it always holds true that \(E_D(\acute{\mathbf {p}}, \mathbf {q}) \ge E_D(\grave{\mathbf {p}}, \mathbf {q})\) for any attacker’s strategy \(\mathbf {q}\), implying that \(\acute{\mathbf {p}}\) dominates \(\grave{\mathbf {p}}\).
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Brahma, S., Njilla, L., Nan, S. (2021). Game Theoretic Hardware Trojan Testing Under Cost Considerations. In: Bošanský, B., Gonzalez, C., Rass, S., Sinha, A. (eds) Decision and Game Theory for Security. GameSec 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13061. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90370-1_14
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