Hybrid Multi-level Hardware Trojan Detection Method for Gate-level Netlists Based on XGBoost

A hybrid multi-level hardware Trojan detection method based on XGBoost algorithm is proposed for the problem of hardware Trojans implanted by malicious third-party manufacturers. The detection method treats each wire in gate-level netlist as a node and detects Trojans in three levels. Firstly, the effective static features of the circuit are extracted and the XGBoost algorithm is applied to detect the suspicious Trojan circuits. Common circuits distinguished at the first level continued to be detected at the second level by analyzing scan chain structural features. Finally, dynamic detection is used to increase further the accuracy of Trojans detection. Experimental results on Trust-hub benchmark show that this method has a higher accuracy compared with other existing detection methods. This detection method can finally achieve 94.0% average True Positive Rate (TPR) and 99.3% average True Negative Rate (TNR).