The Seeker’s Dilemma: Realistic Formulation and Benchmarking for Hardware Trojan Detection
Amin Sarihi, Ahmad Patooghy, Abdel‐Hameed A. Badawy, Peter Jamieson · 2024
This work focuses on advancing the security field in the hardware design space by formally defining the 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" (an extension of Hide&Seek on a graph), where a detecting agent is unaware of whether HTs infect circuits or not. Using this 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. Our innovative dataset will help the community better judge the detection quality of different methods by comparing their success rates in circuit classification. We use our 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.