Hardware Trojans (HT) have emerged as a significant threat to both the IC industry and the military due to their stealthy nature and destructive capabilities. An HT is a small piece of hardware (circuit) embedded by an adversary to disrupt the victim circuit’s regular operation. As a result, it becomes an utmost necessity to distinguish standard signals from them. The detection of HT has become critical due to the presence of enormous search space combined with its small size. A clustering-based approach is proposed to identify benign signals in this work. The proposed approach combines both transition probability and combinational controllability to generate an effective HT free whitelist. It reduces the overhead of search space for HT detection. The clusters generated (whitelist) are analyzed in the presence of several ultra-small triggers which advocates the efficacy of the proposed solution. Simulation results on various ISCAS benchmark circuits validate the significance and quality of such clusters in terms of observed transition. Experimental results also underpin the proposed methodology’s superiority over existing techniques by identifying proper whitelist easily.

硬件木马 (HT) 由于其隐蔽性和破坏性能力，已成为对 IC 行业和军队的重大威胁。HT 是攻击者嵌入的一小块硬件（电路），用于破坏受害者电路的正常运行。因此，将标准信号与它们区分开来就变得极为必要。由于存在巨大的搜索空间及其小尺寸，HT 的检测变得至关重要。提出了一种基于聚类的方法来识别这项工作中的良性信号。所提出的方法结合了转移概率和组合可控性来生成有效的无HT白名单。它减少了HT检测的搜索空间开销。生成的集群（白名单) 在存在几个超小触发器的情况下进行分析，这些触发器提倡所提出的解决方案的功效。各种 ISCAS 基准电路的仿真结果验证了此类集群在观察到的转变方面的重要性和质量。实验结果还通过轻松识别适当的白名单来巩固所提出的方法优于现有技术。