On application of one-class SVM to reverse engineering-based hardware Trojan detection

Abstract

Due to design and fabrication outsourcing to foundries, the problem of malicious modifications to integrated circuits known as hardware Trojans has attracted attention in academia as well as industry. To reduce the risks associated with Trojans, researchers have proposed different approaches to detect them. Among these approaches, test-time detection approaches have drawn the greatest attention and most approaches assume the existence of a "golden model". Prior works suggest using reverse-engineering to identify such Trojan-free ICs for the golden model but they did not state how to do this efficiently. In this paper, we propose an innovative and robust reverseengineering approach to identify the Trojan-free ICs. We adapt a well-studied machine learning method, one-class support vector machine, to solve our problem. Simulation results using state-ofthe-art tools on several publicly available circuits show that our approach can detect hardware Trojans with high accuracy rate across different modeling and algorithm parameters.

A security-aware design scheme for better hardware Trojan detection sensitivity

“…We will propose in this paper a design-time strategy which increases the design's sensitivity to our previously proposed reverse engineering based Trojan detection approach [1]. It obtains the layout images through RE, breaks this layout into non-overlapping grids and uses the layout obtained via RE together with a golden layout (which is assumed to be with the designer since they have control over the design) to extract several features.…”

“…We are interested in finding any design-time strategies that can make detection of Trojans easier using [1]. As a motivating example, we choose one benchmark, s298, from ISCAS89 [2].…”

“…In this paper, we propose an innovative design-time strategy that allows easier test-time detection of Trojans using RE based method such as [1]. Our technique relies on choosing a subset of standard cells that are more sensitive to Trojan insertion from a given technology library.…”

“…This enables early adoption of security techniques into the EDA tool flow. We choose [1] as our test-time approach because it can be used to verify that a chip is golden which is the underlying assumption of many other test-time approaches. Furthermore, since it uses RE, it is arguably among the strongest approaches to detect Trojans.…”

“…The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II gives a brief review of hardware Trojans and detection methods espcially [1]. In Section III, the problem we want to solve, the motivation and several challenges in solving it are discussed.…”