Hardware Trojan
Beginner
A hidden, harmful change to a chip. It stays quiet until something wakes it up.
Novice
A deliberately hidden change to a chip’s circuit. It usually has two parts: a trigger that waits for a rare condition, and a payload that then leaks data, changes what the chip does or disables it.
Expert
Can enter through the RTL, third-party IP, design tools, the factory or packaging. A small trigger rarely fires during ordinary testing, so detection combines tests aimed at rare conditions, side-channel measurements (power, timing, heat) and physical reverse engineering against a known-good reference.
Explained in Defense (Industries).