A survey of hardware trojan taxonomy and detection

design and fabrication process, ICs are becoming in-creasingly vulnerable to malicious activities and alter-ations. These vulnerabilities have raised serious concerns regarding possible threats to military sys-tems, financial infrastructures, transportation security, and household appliances. An adversary can intro-duce a Trojan designed to disable or destroy a system at some future time, or the Trojan could leak confi-dential information and secret keys covertly to the ad-versary. Trojans can be implemented as hardware modifications to ASICs, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts, microprocessors, microcontrollers, net-work processors, or digital-signal processors (DSPs). They can also be implemented as firmware modifica-tions to, for example, FPGA bitstreams. These con-cerns have been documented in recent reports fro