Hierarchical Hardware Trojan for LUT-based AI Devices and its Evaluation

Abstract

To realize Society 5.0, edge AI techniques have attracted attention. On the other hand, security issues of edge AI have been reported. In addition, in the field of hardware security, the threat of hardware Trojan (HT) is emphasized. To defend the AI device from malicious attacks, it is important to check the vulnerability against various attacks. Therefore, this study proposes a new HT for AI inference devices. The proposed HT falsifies the inference result with respect to an arbitrary trigger input. The proposed HT concentrates on the Lookup Table (LUT) structure, and can be achieved by rewriting the LUT table information. As a result, the proposed HT does not need additional trojan trigger and payload circuits, that is, it can be implemented without the circuit overhead. Experiments by field programable gate array show the validity of the proposed HT.