Adversarially Robust Hardware Trojan Detection with Synthetic Data Augmentation
TL;DR
This paper evaluates the robustness of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, a leading algorithm in state-of-the-art HT detection frameworks, under gradient-based adversarial attacks, and highlights the need to reframe hardware security evaluations beyond nominal accuracy toward adversarial robustness.
Abstract
As semiconductor manufacturing becomes increasingly outsourced to untrusted entities, Hardware Trojan (HT) attacks pose a critical threat to the security and reliability of modern integrated circuits. Machine learning models have improved the effectiveness of HT detection using Ring Oscillator Network (RON) side-channel data, yet recent work shows that these models are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This paper evaluates the robustness of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, a leading algorithm in state-of-the-art HT detection frameworks, under gradient-based adversarial attacks. The proposed work demonstrates that high nominal accuracy does not ensure security against these attacks, which can reduce recall to zero. To strengthen resilience, three data-augmentation methods are investigated: SMOTE, Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Network (CTGAN), and Tabular Variational Autoencoder (TVAE). TVAE produces high-fidelity synthetic samples and substantially improves robustness, maintaining over 91% accuracy for nominal performance and over 88% accuracy under strong adversarial perturbations that cause a 100% attack success rate for the surrogate model. The results highlight the need to reframe hardware security evaluations beyond nominal accuracy toward adversarial robustness.