Detection of hardware backdoor through microcontroller read time analysis

Abstract

The objective of this work, christened “HABA” (Hardware Backdoor Aware) is to collect data samples of series of read time of microcontroller embedded on military grade equipments and correlate it with previously stored expected behavior read time samples so as to detect abnormality or otherwise. I was motivated by the challenges faced by the Nigerian military who have labour onerously to put a stop to the menace of the terrorist group “Boko Haram” but while having achieved some measure of success, are ambushed and killed by terrorists as a result of possible information leakage or intellectual property theft. The methodology adopted is Prototyping and the expected result is a correlation coefficient that will show level of similarity of Hexadecimal codes contained in the microcontroller of the equipments under test.

Keywords: Backdoor, Hardware Backdoor, Correlation Coefficient, Read Time Analysis