A role for embedded instrumentation in real-time hardware assurance and online monitoring against cybersecurity threats

Our 2019 AUTOTESTCON paper [1] introduced the concept of hardware assurance for security and trust that focused on Trojan payloads and triggers and the use of embedded instruments and data collection from those instruments as one of the detection strategies. A Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant funded the proof of concept of using a COTS board as a sandboxed emulation environment to safely study the attack scenarios associated with various Trojan attacks, and that effort is described in this article.