Technological devices have become deeply embedded in people's lives, and their demand is growing every year. It has been indicated that outsourcing the design and manufacturing of integrated circuits, which are essential for technological devices, may lead to the insertion of malicious circuitry, called hardware Trojans (HTs). This paper proposes an HT detection method at gate-level netlists based on XGBoost, one of the best gradient boosting decision tree models. We first propose the optimal set of HT features among many feature candidates at a netlist level through thorough evaluations. Then, we construct an XGBoost-based HT detection method with its optimized hyperparameters. Evaluation experiments were conducted on the netlists from Trust-HUB benchmarks and showed the average F-measure of 0.842 using the proposed method. Also, we newly propose a Trojan probability propagation method that effectively corrects the HT detection results and apply it to the results obtained by XGBoost-based HT detection. Evaluation experiments showed that the average F-measure is improved to 0.861. This value is 0.194 points higher than that of the existing best method proposed so far.

Recently, with the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, embedded hardware devices have been used in a variety of everyday electrical items. Due to the increased demand for embedded hardware devices, some of the IC design and manufacturing steps have been outsourced to third-party vendors. Since malicious third-party vendors may insert malicious circuits, called hardware Trojans, into their products, developing an effective hardware-Trojan detection method is strongly required. In this paper, we propose 25 hardware-Trojan features focusing on the structure of trigger circuits for machine-learning-based hardware-Trojan detection. Combining the proposed features into 11 existing hardware-Trojan features, we totally utilize 36 hardware-Trojan features for classification. Then we classify the nets in an unknown netlist into a set of normal nets and Trojan nets based on a random-forest classifier. The experimental results demonstrate that the average true positive rate (TPR) becomes 64.2% and the average true negative rate (TNR) becomes 100.0%. They improve the average TPR by 14.8 points while keeping the average TNR compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the proposed method successfully finds out Trojan nets in several benchmark circuits, which are not found by the existing method.