Abstract:

The effectiveness of hardware security verification is affected by the way of constructing formal verification models.To solve this problem,this paper proposes a method which can automatically construct formal verification models for hardware Trojans detection.First,the method traverses the control flow graphs of the register transfer level design to extract the path conditions of assignment statements and the corresponding expressions.The constraint relations of the Kripke’ state transition are generated based on the path conditions and the expressions.Second,the constraint relations of the Verilog grammar are transformed to the grammar of the model checker and generate the formal verification models.Finally,a model checker verifies the models and detects the hardware Trojans when a predefined specification is verified as false.In experiments,the hardware Trojans in the Trust-HUB benchmarks are detected,which shows that the models constructed by our method can effectively detect hardware Trojans in register transfer level design.

Key words: formal verification, model checking, hardware security, hardware Trojan, security verification