An Unsupervised Detection Approach for Hardware Trojans

Abstract

With the booming development of the cyber-physical system, human society is much more dependent on information technology. Unfortunately, like software, hardware is not trusted at all, due to so many third parties involved in the separated integrated circuit's (IC) design and manufacturing stages for the high profit. The malicious circuits (named Hardware Trojans) can be implanted during any stage of the ICs' design and manufacturing process. However, the existing pre-silicon approaches based on machine learning theory have good performance, they all belong to supervised learning methods, which have a key prerequisite that is numerous already known information. Meanwhile, hardware Trojans are even more unimaginable because today's ICs are becoming more complicated. The known information is even harder to gain. Furthermore, the training process for supervised learning methods tends to be time-consuming and generally requires a huge amount of balanced training data. Therefore, this paper proposes an unsupervised hardware Trojans detection approach by combined the principal component analysis (PCA) and local outlier factor (LOF) algorithm, called PL-HTD. We firstly visualize the distribution features of normal nets and Trojan nets, and then reveal the differences between the two types of nets to reduce the dimension of the feature set. According to the outliers of each net, the abnormal nets are selected and verified by professionals later to confirm whether it is a true Trojan relative to the host circuit to realize the detection. The experiments show that the proposed method can detect hardware Trojans effectively and reduce the cost of manual secondary detection. For the Trust-HUB benchmarks, the PL-HTD achieves up to 73.08% TPR and 97.52% average TNR, moreover, it achieves average 96.00% accuracy, which shows the feasibility and efficiency of hardware Trojans detecting by employing a method without the guidance of class label information.