Trojan Playground: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Hardware Trojan Insertion and Detection

Current Hardware Trojan (HT) detection techniques are mostly developed based on a limited set of HT benchmarks. Existing HT benchmarks circuits are generated with multiple shortcomings, i.e., i) they are heavily biased by the designers' mindset when they are created, and ii) they are created through a one-dimensional lens, mainly the signal activity of nets. To address these shortcomings, we introduce the first automated reinforcement learning (RL) HT insertion and detection framework. In the insertion phase, an RL agent explores the circuits and finds different locations that are best for keeping inserted HTs hidden. On the defense side, we introduce a multi-criteria RL-based detector that generates test vectors to discover the existence of HTs. Using the proposed framework, one can explore the HT insertion and detection design spaces to break the human mindset limitations as well as the benchmark issues, ultimately leading toward the next-generation of innovative detectors. Our HT toolset is open-source to accelerate research in this field and reduce the initial setup time for newcomers. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework on ISCAS-85 benchmarks and provide the attack and detection success rates and define a methodology for comparing our techniques.