Designing hardware trojans and their detection based on a SVM-based approach

Since hardware production become inexpensive and international, hardware vendors often outsource their products to third-party vendors. Due to the situation, malicious vendors can easily insert malfunctions (also known as 'hardware Trojans') to their products. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate a machine-learning-based hardware-Trojan detection method using several hardware Trojans we designed. To begin with, we design three types of hardware Trojans and insert them to simple RS232 transceiver circuits. After that, we learn known netlists, where we know which nets are Trojan ones or normal ones beforehand, using a machine-learning-based hardware-Trojan detection method with a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Finally, we classify the nets in the designed hardware-Trojan-inserted netlists into a set of Trojan nets and that of normal nets using the learned classifier. The experimental results demonstrate that the hardware-Trojan detection method with the SVM-based approach can detect a part of hardware Trojans we designed.