Hardware-Trojan Detection based on the Structural Features of Trojan Circuits Using Random Forests

Abstract

Recently, with the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, embedded hardware devices have been used in a variety of everyday electrical items. Due to the increased demand for embedded hardware devices, some of the IC design and manufacturing steps have been outsourced to third-party vendors. Since malicious third-party vendors may insert malicious circuits, called hardware Trojans, into their products, developing an effective hardware-Trojan detection method is strongly required. In this paper, we propose 25 hardware-Trojan features focusing on the structure of trigger circuits for machine-learning-based hardware-Trojan detection. Combining the proposed features into 11 existing hardware-Trojan features, we totally utilize 36 hardware-Trojan features for classification. Then we classify the nets in an unknown netlist into a set of normal nets and Trojan nets based on a random-forest classifier. The experimental results demonstrate that the average true positive rate (TPR) becomes 64.2% and the average true negative rate (TNR) becomes 100.0%. They improve the average TPR by 14.8 points while keeping the average TNR compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the proposed method successfully finds out Trojan nets in several benchmark circuits, which are not found by the existing method.