Hardware Trojans are tiny pieces of circuitry that hide amongst millions, or even billions of transistors. They lay dormant until some hard to detect trigger springs them into action. Then the start their malicious behaviors like draining power or leaking secret information. The are by design difficult to detect, but our recent research shows that information flow tracking is a useful way to find and eliminate them. The research was a cover feature for the August issue of IEEE Computer. The paper’s authors are Kastner Research Group (KRG) Postdoc Wei Hu, Computer Science and Technology Ph.D. candidate Baolei Mao of Northwestern Polytechnical University (and former KRG visiting graduate student), Tortuga Logic CEO Jason Oberg, and CSE Professor Ryan Kastner. Three of the four authors (Baolei is missing) are shown a couple years ago taking in the sites at Xi’an.

Links: IEEE Computer Article, UCSD Press Release, UCSD CSE news article, QI Press Release, JSOE Press Release, Cyberwire, eWeek