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Hardware Trojan Free Netlist Identification: A Clustering Approach

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Abstract

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.

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Data Availability

The ISCAS benchmark circuits used (Bench format) in this experiment are open source and are freely available from http://www.pld.ttu.ee/~maksim/benchmarks/. Additionally, the trigger inserted data sets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgment

This work is supported by DST-SERB under core research scheme (Formerly EMR) through grant # EMR/2017/003206 and Young Faculty Research Fellow of Visvesvaraya PhD scheme # [MLA/MUM/GA/10(37)B].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India

    Anindan Mondal, Rajesh Kumar Biswal, Mahabub Hasan Mahalat, Suchismita Roy & Bibhash Sen

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  1. Anindan Mondal
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  2. Rajesh Kumar Biswal
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  3. Mahabub Hasan Mahalat
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  4. Suchismita Roy
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  5. Bibhash Sen
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Correspondence to Bibhash Sen.

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Responsible Editor: C. A. Papachristou

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Mondal, A., Biswal, R.K., Mahalat, M.H. et al. Hardware Trojan Free Netlist Identification: A Clustering Approach. J Electron Test 37, 317–328 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-021-05953-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-021-05953-1

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