A new hardware Trojan detection technique using deep convolutional neural network

The involvement of external vendors in semiconductor industries increases the chance of hardware Trojan (HT) insertion in different phases of the integrated circuit (IC) design. Recently, several partial reverse engineering (RE) based HT detection techniques are reported, which attempt to reduce the time and complexity involved in the full RE process by applying machine learning or image processing techniques in IC images. However, these techniques fail to extract the relevant image features, not robust to image variations, complicated, less generalizable, and possess a low detection rate. Therefore, to overcome the above limitations, this paper proposes a new partial RE based HT detection technique that detects Trojans from IC layout images using Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). The proposed DCNN model consists of stacking several convolutional and pooling layers. It layer-wise extracts and selects the most relevant and robust features automatically from the IC images and eliminates the need to apply the feature extraction algorithm separately. To prevent the over-training of the DCNN model, a new stopping condition method and two new metrics, namely Accuracy difference measure (ADM) and Loss difference measure (LDM), are proposed that halts the training only when the performance of our model genuinely drops. Further, to combat the issue of process variations and fabrication noise generated during the RE process, we include noisy images with varying parameters in the training process of the model. We also apply the data augmentation and regularization techniques in the model to address the issues of underfitting and overfitting. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed technique provides 99% and 97.4% accuracy on Trust-Hub and synthetic ISCAS dataset, respectively, which is on-an-average 15.83% and 21.69% higher than the existing partial RE based techniques.