SC-COTD: Hardware Trojan Detection Based on Sequential/Combinational Testability Features using Ensemble Classifier

Security against Hardware Trojans (HT) is an important concern in integrated circuits (IC) design and fabrication. Most of the current HT detection methods are based on the golden model of circuit design. Further, some approaches require test pattern for HTs activation. In this paper, we propose SC-COTD (Sequential/Combinational Controllability and Observability features for hardware Trojan Detection), an effective hardware Trojan detection to get rid of both golden chip and test pattern limitations. SC-COTD uses both sequential and combinational testability measures to detect and locate HT signals by a machine learning approach. This method deploys an ensemble classifier based on k-means clustering. The clustering models have diverse variety in testability features along with size of clustering which inspect and reveal different aspects of netlist conventional for a collaborative scheme. The clustering results are filtered and then fed into a decision-making procedure based on majority voting to eliminate the limited flaws of each model. The evaluation results on TrustHUB benchmarks demonstrate that, SC-COTD can detect and locate HTs with 100% without any false negative, i.e., Recall = 1. Although our method has a limited number of false positive, it has the best performance in comparison to well-known previous approaches.