Hiding in Plain Sight: Reframing Hardware Trojan Benchmarking as a Hide&Seek Modification
This work addresses security challenges in hardware design by providing a more realistic benchmark for evaluating detection methods, though it is incremental as it builds on existing HT detection tools.
The authors tackled the problem of Hardware Trojan detection by reframing it as a realistic 'Seeker's Dilemma' where detectors are uncertain about circuit infections, and they created a benchmark with restructured circuits that caused significant misclassification, with some infected circuits mapping closely to HT-free ones in PCA analysis.
This work focuses on advancing security research in the hardware design space by formally defining the realistic problem of Hardware Trojan (HT) detection. The goal is to model HT detection more closely to the real world, i.e., describing the problem as The Seeker's Dilemma where a detecting agent is unaware of whether circuits are infected by HTs or not. Using this theoretical problem formulation, we create a benchmark that consists of a mixture of HT-free and HT-infected restructured circuits while preserving their original functionalities. The restructured circuits are randomly infected by HTs, causing a situation where the defender is uncertain if a circuit is infected or not. We believe that our innovative benchmark and methodology of creating benchmarks will help the community judge the detection quality of different methods by comparing their success rates in circuit classification. We use our developed benchmark to evaluate three state-of-the-art HT detection tools to show baseline results for this approach. We use Principal Component Analysis to assess the strength of our benchmark, where we observe that some restructured HT-infected circuits are mapped closely to HT-free circuits, leading to significant label misclassification by detectors.