Detection of Hardware Trojans in SystemC HLS Designs via Coverage-guided Fuzzing

High-level Synthesis (HLS) is being increasingly adopted as a mean to raise design productivity. HLS designs, which can be automatically translated into RTL, are typically written in SystemC at a more abstract level. Hardware Trojan attacks and countermeasures, while well-known and well-researched for RTL and below, have been only recently considered for HLS. The paper makes a contribution to this emerging research area by proposing a novel detection approach for Hardware Trojans in SystemC HLS designs. The proposed approach is based on coverage-guided fuzzing, a new promising idea from software (security) testing research. The efficiency of the approach in identifying stealthy behavior is demonstrated on a set of open-source benchmarks.