  Hardware Trojan detection and protection is becoming more crucial as more
untrusted third parties manufacture many parts of critical systems nowadays.
The most common way to detect hardware Trojans is comparing the untrusted
design with a golden (trusted) one. However, third-party intellectual
properties (IPs) are black boxes with no golden IPs to trust. So, previous
attempts to detect hardware Trojans will not work with third-party IPs. In this
work, we present novel methods for Trojan protection and detection on field
programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) without the need for golden chips. Presented
methods work at runtime instead of test time. We provide a wide spectrum of
Trojan detection and protection methods. While the simplest methods have low
overhead and provide limited protection mechanisms, more sophisticated and
costly techniques are introduced that can detect hardware Trojans and even
clean up the system from infected IPs. Moreover, we study the cost of using the
FPGA partial reconfiguration feature to get rid of infected IPs. In addition,
we discuss the possibility to construct IP core certificate authority that
maintains a centralized database of unsafe vendors and IPs. We show the
practicality of the introduced schemes by implementing the different
methodologies on FPGAs. Results show that simple methods present negligible
overheads and as we try to increase security the delay and power overheads
increase.
