The Seeker's Dilemma: Realistic Formulation and Benchmarking for
  Hardware Trojan Detection
Amin Sarihi Ahmad Patooghy Abdel-Hameed A. Badawy Peter Jamieson
This work focuses on advancing security research in the hardware design space
by formally defining the realistic problem of Hardware Trojan (HT) detection.
The goal is to model HT detection more closely to the real world, i.e.,
describing the problem as "The Seeker's Dilemma" (an extension of Hide&Seek on
a graph), where a detecting agent is unaware of whether circuits are infected
by HTs or not. Using this theoretical problem formulation, we create a
benchmark that consists of a mixture of HT-free and HT-infected restructured
circuits while preserving their original functionalities. The restructured
circuits are randomly infected by HTs, causing a situation where the defender
is uncertain if a circuit is infected or not. We believe that our innovative
dataset will help the community better judge the detection quality of different
methods by comparing their success rates in circuit classification. We use our
developed benchmark to evaluate three state-of-the-art HT detection tools to
show baseline results for this approach. We use Principal Component Analysis to
assess the strength of our benchmark, where we observe that some restructured
HT-infected circuits are mapped closely to HT-free circuits, leading to
significant label misclassification by detectors.