A Deep Learning Method Based on the Attention Mechanism for Hardware Trojan Detection

Abstract

The chip manufacturing of integrated circuits requires the participation of multiple parties, which greatly increases the possibility of hardware Trojan insertion and poses a significant threat to the entire hardware device landing; however, traditional hardware Trojan detection methods require gold chips, so the detection cost is relatively high. The attention mechanism can extract data with more adequate features, which can enhance the expressiveness of the network. This paper combines an attention module with a multilayer perceptron and convolutional neural network for hardware Trojan detection based on side-channel information, and evaluates the detection results by implementing specific experiments. The results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms machine learning classification methods and network-related methods, such as SVM and KNN, in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 value. In addition, the proposed method is effective in detecting data containing one or multiple hardware Trojans, and shows high sensitivity to the size of datasets.