AES design improvement towards information safety

With the rapid development and globalization of semiconductor design and fabrication, integrated circuit (IC) is becoming more vulnerable to malicious modification called hardware Trojan. As Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) core has been widely used in security critical applications, it can easily become a target of Hardware Trojan. In this paper, 9 potential AES hardware Trojans, which cover Trojan types leaking key or plain text are demonstrated. Then three protections of varying strengths against the proposed Trojans, including combination, reorder, and reconfiguration logic insertion, are presented. The proposed protections are shown to effectively disfunction the 9 types of potential Trojans. Therefore, the information security of AES is significantly improved.