An Improved Automatic Hardware Trojan Generation Platform

Abstract

Over the past 10 years, various Hardware Trojan (HT) detection techniques have been proposed by the research community. However, the development of HT benchmark suites for testing and evaluating HT detection techniques lags behind. The number of HT-infected circuits available in current public HT benchmarks is somewhat limited and the circuits lack diversity in structure. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method to generate HTs using a highly configurable generation platform based on transition probability. The generation platform is highly configurable in terms of the HT trigger condition, trigger type, payload type and in the number and variety of HT-infected circuits that can be generated. In this research the transition probability of netlists is employed to identify rarely activated internal nodes to target for HT insertion rather than functional simulation as utilised in previous research. The authors believe transition probability provides a more realistic reflection of the netlist activity for use in determining the appropriate position for HT insertion. Finally, the generated HT-infected circuits are tested by a machine learning (ML)-based HT detection technique, which is known as Controllability and Observability for HT Detection (COTD). The resulting false positive and false negative rates illustrate the feasibility of the benchmark suite.