GDSII-Guard: ECO Anti-Trojan Optimization with Exploratory Timing-Security Trade-Offs

Xinming Wei, Jiaxi Zhang, Guojie Luo

Abstract: With the ever-shrinking feature size of transistors, the exorbitant cost has driven the massive outsourcing of integrated circuits (IC) fabrication. However, this outsourcing poses significant security risks because untrustworthy foundries can conduct insidious fabrication-time attacks without close supervision. Therefore, it is crucial to undertake design-time protection before sending finalized design layouts to the foundry. Foundry-level hardware Trojan has emerged as a major security threat, but existing design-time countermeasures lack sufficient consideration of good trade-offs between design security and performance.This work proposes an automatic framework, GDSII-Guard, to strengthen implemented physical layouts against potential fabrication-time Trojan attacks while preserving design performance, power, and quality. We develop an Engineering Change Order (ECO) placement and routing (P&R) flow containing elaborate anti-Trojan operators to prevent Trojan insertion. Moreover, we introduce a multi-objective optimization model with evolutionary strategies that incorporate anti-Trojan flow information to exploit balances between the aforementioned multiple design metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that GDSII-Guard reduces the overall risk of Trojan attacks on given designs by 98.8% with minimized timing, power, and design quality impact, surpassing existing approaches prominently.