A Multi-Objective Task Mapping Method for Enhancing Security Against Hardware Trojans in Heterogeneous Multi-Core System

Once triggered, Hardware Trojans (HT) can damage the performance or functionality of a heterogeneous multi-core system (HMCS) to fulfill the attacker’s intentions. Existing methods cannot guarantee a system to be 100% Trojan-free prior to deployment. This paper introduces a task mapping strategy based on application redundancy execution to address the HT threat in HMCS. The primary aim is to minimize the probability of HT triggering during computing unit (CU) operation while minimizing the makespans of application under security constraints. Initially, the probability of HT activation HT is converted into a function tied to CU runtime. Subsequently, a security enhanced NSGA-II algorithm (SEA-NSGA-II) is devised to solve this multi-objective optimization problem. Specifically, the algorithm introduces security enhanced adjustable heterogeneous earliest finish time (SEA-HEFT), security enhanced adjustable heterogeneous minimum trigger probability (SEA-HMTP), and security enhanced adjustable random scheduling (SEA-RS) to accelerate the convergence speed and increase the diversity of solutions. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks and randomly generated applications demonstrate that SEA-NSGA-II solutions have higher HV values, along with better convergence and diversity. In real-world benchmarks, the HV value of SEA-NSGA-II is increased by an average of 54.677% and 2113.778% compared to DRHEFT and NSGA-II, respectively. In randomly generated applications, the HV values of SEA-NSGA-II are also higher than those of DRHEFT and NSGA-II.