• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.78-87
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• 2021

Information technology (IT) has been applied to various fields, and currently, IT devices and systems are used in very important areas, such as aviation, industry, and national defense. Such devices and systems are subject to various types of malicious attacks, which can be software or hardware based. Compared to software-based attacks, hardware-based attacks are known to be much more difficult to detect. A hardware Trojan horse is a representative example of hardware-based attacks. A hardware Trojan horse attack inserts a circuit into an IC chip. The inserted circuit performs malicious actions, such as causing a system malfunction or leaking important information. This has increased the potential for attack in the current supply chain environment, which is jointly developed by various companies. In this paper, we discuss the future direction of research by introducing attack cases, the characteristics of hardware Trojan horses, and countermeasure trends.