Graph Neural Network based Hardware Trojan Detection at Intermediate Representative for SoC Platforms

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry has increased the demand for intellectual property (IP) cores. Increasing numbers of third-party vendors have raised security concerns for System-on-Chip (SoC) designers. With the growing complexity of SoC design, the workload is overwhelming for SoC designers to diagnose security vulnerabilities manually. Almost all existing SoC platforms are developed using SystemVerilog. However, there is a lack of reliable security static analysis tools for directly processing the SystemVerilog program. Due to its open-source, flexibility and extendability, RISC-V CPU has become an ideal platform for the IoT applications such as wearable devices, entertainment, smart thermostats, etc. As a result, assuring the trustworthiness of a given RISC-V system is highly desired. This paper proposes a graph neural network-based Trojan detection framework to protect the RISC-V SoC platform written in SystemVerilog from intruding malicious logic. The study is under-construction and planned to be validated on the Ariane RISC-V CPU with several peripheral IPs in the experimental section.