A Multi-Layer Hardware Trojan Protection Framework for IoT Chips

Abstract

Since integrated circuits are performed by several untrusted manufacturers, malicious circuits (hardware Trojans) can be implanted in any stage of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. With the globalization of the IoT device manufacturing technologies, protecting the system-on-chip (SoC) security is always the keys issue for scientists and IC manufacturers. The existing SoC high-level synthesis approaches cannot guarantee both register-transfer-level and gate-level security, such as some formal verification and circuit characteristic analysis technologies. Based on the structural characteristics of hardware Trojans, we propose a multi-layer hardware Trojan protection framework for the Internet-of-Things perception layer called RG-Secure, which combines the third-party intellectual property trusted design strategy with the scan-chain netlist feature analysis technology. Especially at the gate level of chip design, our RG-Secure is equipped with a distributed, lightweight gradient lifting algorithm called lightGBM. The algorithm can quickly process high-dimensional circuit feature information and effectively improve the detection efficiency of hardware Trojans. In the meanwhile, a common evaluation index F-measure is used to prove the effectiveness of our method. The experiments show that RG-Secure framework can simultaneously detect register-transfer-level and gate-level hardware Trojans. For the trust-HUB benchmarks, the optimized lightGBM classifier achieves up to 100% true positive rate and 94% true negative rate; furthermore, it achieves 99.8% average F-measure and 99% accuracy, which shows a promising approach to ensure security during the design stage.